If you want a sure thing in the quest to discover your self, you could spend the next ten years in analysis, see a psychologist, join a cult, read every book of philosophy and physics or you can read Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. I jest. But, this is about the illusory nature of theatre, more than the individual self. But still... We could wonder more about who we are by the end of it.
The forgotten modernist text that came out in that recent centenary of greats around 1922 (1921 in this case), the title sounds as good in translation as it does in the original. Clever of Pirandello to achieve that.
Plays often don’t work on the page, you miss all the staging. But in this case, the staging acts like text so you can read the extensive stage directions like you might read landscape details or even character descriptions. Again, pretty clever of Pirandello to make his work so usable.
What goes on here? Well, a theatre company is about to rehearse a play by Luigi Pirandello. They are gathering, the lead actress is late as one might expect, the stage is unfinished, stuff is kind of lying around, the lights aren’t set up right.
They are about to start and then, six characters come by. This is a big production. There’s half a dozen ‘actors’, producer, stage managers, prompters etc, so on stage at any one time there is usually around 15 people. Pirandello should know better, but you have to keep you budget down and think small cast. But, it’s not a play, it’s a “real” event we are watching, the play hasn’t started yet… the details haven’t been written, it’s all emerging.
These characters start telling everyone about their lives, only they are short on detail and big on passionate expression. So they come across as so ‘real’ that the producer abandons rehearsals and starts listening to the characters and thinks this would make a great play. At one level, the characters represent the stock in trade types, father, mother, son, daughter in law etc from which a family drama might be explored.
The producer and the characters go off and start to write and rehearse this new play. The producer becomes their author in a sense. They are raw, undetailed. They wear representative masks, they are not yet well drawn characters, or even selves. They think they are real and credible, based on their endless emotional outpourings. This makes me think I am reading at times a novel by Rachel Cusk and after reading this, I in fact read her recent book Second Place (funnily enough published 100 years after Six Characters, though unintentionally I suspect).
Pirandello loves to toy with illusions, the stage is not a stage, the actors are meagre performers, the only real is the unformed self, or the present embodiment of the self as it speaks in front of the audience, or perhaps the person speaking to you in the street is the only real we can experience, or what they say is the only thing we can know.
Best to read it, but there are no endings in the search. Oddly, as a Sicilian, Pirandello didn’t get much exposure in his native land for his theatre.