Six Characters in Search of an Author

A theatre group has just started rehearsing a new production called Mixing It Up, when six persons enter the hall, who all look mysteriously different, but this becomes even more obvious when they start speaking: they want to be a “new play”, they want to live their family “drama, full of pain” onstage. Gradually, they manage to attract the director’s attention and in front of the eyes of the thespians (and the spectators of the play within the play) their sad story increasingly emerges and touchingly reveals their traumas. When Father and Mother separated, they placed Son in foster care, Mother started a new family with her second husband, but after his death they hit upon such poverty that Stepdaughter has to secretly engage in prostitution. But then one day Father, her mother’s first husband, appears as a client …

Although Pirandello only focused on playwriting in the late years of his career, when he had already achieved fame in his homeland with his novels and short stories, it was his theatre work that first won him international acclaim. Perhaps the biggest influence was his play Six Characters in Search of an Author, which caused a great upset at the baptismal production in Rome but was quickly recognised as a piece of art and summarised the attack of the modernist at the traditional theatre forms. This was the first of his three so-called plays of “theatre within theatre”, which deal with the relationship between appearance and reality, life and theatre, private and performed social roles. Pirandello himself describes his unusual play that was born out of the question “why not portray something completely different – an author who refuses to give life to some of the characters born in his imagination”, as a “mixture of tragic and comic, fantastic and realistic, all together in a humorous situation …” 

As a “living, eruptive theatre of creative thinking”, the text was produced in Nova Gorica in 1985, directed by Mile Korun; this time, it is directed by Paolo Magelli. The internationally renowned theatre magus last directed A. P. Chekhov’s The Seagull (2017) in Nova Gorica, where the questions about the point of art in general and theatre specifically are also at the core.