A rehearsal is interrupted by six unfinished figures who walk in off the street and demand that their drama be performed (1921)
Six Characters in Search of an Author — the Rome premiere ended in uproar, with shouts of 'madhouse!'
Literature · Playwrights
Luigi Pirandello
1867–1936 · Italian
Teatro grottesco; metatheatre
Luigi Pirandello was a Sicilian novelist, short-story writer and playwright who tore up the conventions of the well-made play. His characters dispute their own identities, refuse to stay inside the fiction, and demonstrate that there is no single truth about anybody. He wrote more than forty plays and some two hundred short stories, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934.
How to spot them
- ▸Metatheatre: the play knows it is a play, and the actors are interrupted
- ▸Identity as a mask — 'one, no one and a hundred thousand' versions of every person
- ▸Sicilian settings, dialect roots, and a bleak comic tone he theorised as 'umorismo'
- ▸Nobel Prize in Literature, 1934
- ▸A member of the National Fascist Party from 1924, which complicates his reputation
Key works
A man who fell from his horse at a costume pageant spends twenty years believing he is a medieval German emperor, and may or may not still believe it (1922)
Henry IV — his other great play, and a famous role for Italian actors.
A town cannot decide which of two relatives is mad, and the veiled woman who could settle it refuses to say (1917)
Right You Are (If You Think So) — Così è (se vi pare).
A man reads his own obituary while away from home, takes a new name and discovers that a man with no documents cannot legally exist (1904)
The Late Mattia Pascal — his breakthrough novel.
A man is told by his wife that his nose is crooked, and systematically destroys every identity other people have given him (1926)
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand — his last novel.
A 1908 essay distinguishing the merely comic — noticing the opposite — from a deeper, pitying sense of it (1908)
L'umorismo (On Humour), the theoretical basis of his drama.
A silent-film cameraman records everything, including a death on set, with total detachment (1915)
Shoot! (Si gira / The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator).
Key ideas
- There is no single truth about a person, only the versions others construct
- The mask: the face society requires against the face that is not there
- 'Umorismo' — the sentiment of the opposite, comedy that turns into pity
- Theatre within theatre: the frame broken so the audience must watch itself watching
Quick-fire facts
- •Born on 28 June 1867 near Agrigento, Sicily, in a district known as Càvusu, from the Greek for chaos
- •His family's sulphur-mine fortune was destroyed by a flood, which helped precipitate his wife's mental illness
- •His wife Antonietta Portulano was institutionalised in 1919 after years of delusional jealousy
- •Wrote more than forty plays and about two hundred short stories, collected as Novelle per un anno
- •The 1921 Rome premiere of Six Characters ended in a riot; its Milan revival was a triumph
- •His 'theatre in the theatre' trilogy is Six Characters, Each in His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise
- •Founded the Teatro d'Arte di Roma in 1925
- •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934 for his revival of dramatic and scenic art
- •Died in Rome on 10 December 1936, leaving instructions for a pauper's funeral with no ceremony
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- Gaspare Giudice — Pirandello: A Biography
- Robert Rietty — Luigi Pirandello: Collected Plays (introduction)