Characters And Authors In Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello is best known in the English-speaking world for his radical challenge to traditional Western theatre with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author. But theatre is just one manifestation of his experiments with language which led to a remarkable collection of novels,short stories, and essays as well as his work for a film industry then in its infancy. This study, which is based on the view that Pirandello's writings are most fruitfully discussed in a European context, takes as its starting-point the author's belief in the primacy of the literary character in acreative process which is necessarily conflictual.The book argues that all Pirandello's characters are engaged in a continual performance which transcends the genre distinction between narrative and dramatic forms. In this performance it is the spoken word in which the characters invest most heavily as they struggle to sustain an identity of theirown, tell their life-stories, and assert themselves before their most prominent antagonist, the author himself.

Six people arrive in a theatre during rehearsals for a play. But they are not ordinary people. They are the characters of a play that has not yet been written. Trapped inside a traumatic event from which they long to escape, they desperately need a writer to complete their story and release them. Intrigued by their situation, the director invites them to act out the key events of their lives ... Pirandello's best-known play and one of the most extraordinary and mysterious plays of the 20th century, Six Characters speaks directly to an age of uncertainty: where do we come from, where are we going, how do we become what we want to be?

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) is an Italian three-act play written by Luigi Pirandello in 1921, considered as one of the earliest examples of absurdist theatre. It's a play within a play that deals with perceptions of reality and illusion, and plays with the ideas of identity and relative truths. The plot features an acting company who have gathered to rehearse another play by Pirandello, when they're interrupted by 6 "characters" who arrive in search of their author. They immediately clash with the manager who at first assumes they're mad. But, as the play progresses, the manager slowly shifts his reality as the characters become more real than the actors. Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in Rome at Valle di Roma and created a huge and clamorous division in the audience, forcing Pirandello to escape out the side door. But a year later it was presented in Milan to great success, before moving on to Broadway in 1922 where it ran for 136 performances.

Publisher Description

A volume of plays from the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, including his most popular and controversial work A Penguin Classic Pirandello is brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre. This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy Henry IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In So It Is (If You Think So), the townspeople exercise a morbid curiosity attempting to discover “the truth” about the Ponza family. Each of these plays can lay claim to being Pirandello’s masterpiece, and in exploring the nature of human personality, each one stretches the resources of drama to their limits. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"No apology is necessary for offering to American readers a play which critics, with singular unanimity, have called one of the most original productions seen on the modern stage. In less than a year's time, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" has won a distinguished place in the dramatic literature of the Western world, attracting audiences and engaging intellects far removed from the particular influences which made of it a season's sensation in Italy." -Preface

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Italian: Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore is an Italian play by Luigi Pirandello, written and first performed in 1921. An absurdist metatheatrical play about the relationship among authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners, it premiered at the Teatro Valle in Rome to a mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of "Manicomio!" ("Madhouse!") and "Incommensurabile!" ("Incommensurable!"), a reaction to the play's illogical progression. Reception improved at subsequent performances, especially after Pirandello provided for the play's third edition, published in 1925, a foreword clarifying its structure and ideas.