Six Characters in Search of an Author
by Luigi Pirandello(1921)
PlayItalian
“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action.”
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Luigi Pirandello(1921)
A theatrical rehearsal is interrupted by six strangers who announce that they are characters abandoned by their creator, and they demand that the actors perform the unfinished drama they carry within them. Luigi Pirandello staged this play in 1921, provoking a near-riot at its Roman premiere, and in doing so shattered the fourth wall with a thoroughness that made it impossible to rebuild. The characters, frozen in their anguished situations, possess a reality more vivid and fixed than the actors who attempt to represent them. Pirandello, who had watched his own wife descend into madness, asked the question the theatre had always avoided: who is more real, the person who changes daily or the character who never can?
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Waiting for GodotSamuel Beckett
Beckett strips the stage to the same existential nakedness, but his characters aren't even looking for an author.
Pale FireVladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's characters escape their text with the same desperation, and the author is just as absent.
Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes
Cervantes invented characters who know they're in a book, and the vertigo Pirandello stages is Quixote's inheritance.