Six Characters in Search of an Author

Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore · Six Characters in Search of an Author · published 1921 · ISBN 9780140189223

Luigi Pirandello — Luigi Pirandello (1867 – 1936) — Italy, writing in Italian. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934.

“for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Luigi Pirandello

Italian novelist and playwright famed for labyrinths of identity, social masks, and the unstable border between theatre and life. His comedy nearly always opens onto a distinctly modern existential unease.

How it came to be

The premiere at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 9 May 1921 turned into a riot: the audience jeered, shouted "Madhouse!", and Pirandello had to leave by a side door. A few months later the same play triumphed in Milan, then travelled to Paris, London and New York and carried Pirandello's name around the world. Both the Italian original and Edward Storer's 1922 English translation are in the public domain.

Summary of Six Characters in Search of an Author

A theatre company is midway through a rehearsal when six strangers walk onto the stage. They introduce themselves as characters an author conceived and then abandoned, and they have come looking for someone willing to finish their story. That story — the father, the mother who left, the stepdaughter who meets her father again in a dress shop that is not a dress shop — proves so raw that the actors cannot play it. The play is never completed: it breaks apart in performance, at the point where the audience can no longer tell rehearsal from reality.

Analysis & legacy

Pirandello makes the stage itself his subject, and does so before "the play within the play" was a familiar device. The six characters claim to be more real than living people, because a person changes from day to day while a character is fixed for ever in a single moment — which is at once their privilege and their life sentence. The collision with the actors is where the play cuts sharpest: each time the company tries to reproduce a scene, the characters cry out that it is wrong, that their pain is being turned into a pose. Beneath the formal game lies a very Pirandellian theme: no one has a single self; each of us is a set of images other people impose, and there is no way to prove which version is true. The play refuses a conclusion, and refuses an ending too — an ending would make it precisely the theatrical illusion it exists to expose.

Themes: Play within a play · Reality and illusion · The fractured self · Modern theatre · Pain that cannot be told

What critics say

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Frequently asked questions

What is Six Characters in Search of an Author about?

A theatre company is midway through a rehearsal when six strangers walk onto the stage. They introduce themselves as characters an author conceived and then abandoned, and they have come looking for someone willing to finish their story. That story — the father, the mother who left, the…

Is Six Characters in Search of an Author worth reading?

Pirandello makes the stage itself his subject, and does so before "the play within the play" was a familiar device. The six characters claim to be more real than living people, because a person changes from day to day while a character is fixed for ever in a single moment — which is at once their…

When did Luigi Pirandello win the Nobel Prize, and why?

Luigi Pirandello won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934: “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art”

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