Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello came to the theatre belatedly, after a successful career as a novelist and shortstory writer, but his late entrance was sensational. His play Six Characters in Search of an Author written in the late teens was staged in Rome in 1921, London and America in 1922, Paris in 1923, and Berlin in 1924—each production under a different iconoclastic director, each notable in its own way. The premiere at the Teato Valle in Rome had a tumultuous reception, with the audience divided into supporters and opponents, echoing the premiere of Jarry’s Ubu Roi and the Playboy riots discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. In response, Pirandello extensively reworked the play in subsequent versions. The play used the ageold form of metatheatre, radically reimagined for the modern stage as an antidote to realism. Into the middle of a rehearsal for a Pirandello play a strange metatheatrical reference for the audience wander six characters from an unfinished drama abandoned by its author. They have a compelling story to tell and they ask the actors and director to set aside the play they have been rehearsing in order to act out the characters’ drama and thereby find closure and completion to what reveals itself to be a very traumatic story. The actors end up staging the characters’ drama—a play within a play—which unsettles the audience, blurring the line between spectator and actor, questioning what is illusion and what is reality. Along the way, the dialogue constantly exposes the weaknesses in conventional theatre and, by analogy, in real life, as full communication of our inner selves is utterly impossible. Shaking with anger, the Producer, who is trying to stage the characters’ drama, rages at their impossible demands I know perfectly well that we’ve all got a life inside us and that we all want to parade it in front of other people. But that’s the difficulty, how to present only the bits that are necessary in relation to the other characters and in the small amount we show, to hint at all the rest of the inner life Act II It would be so much simpler, he says, if each character could simply give a soliloquy pouring out to the audience ‘what’s bubbling away inside him’. But ‘that’s not the way we work’. An old model of theatre must give way to a new one founded on restraint.