Six Characters would be subsequently performed internationally to great acclaim and acknowledgment as a watershed drama with its innovative treatment of philosophical themes and dazzling experimentation with dramatic structure. The play’s startling premise-the interruption of a play rehearsal by six characters conjured and then abandoned by their author who seek the means to exhibit their drama-was so shocking when the play was first per-formed in Rome in 1921 that the audience rioted. Called by critic Felicity Firth “the major single subversive moment in the history of modern theatre,” the play is a dizzying hall of mirrors that tests the philosophical basis of the concept of reality while exposing and renewing the operating principles of the drama. It can be argued that with Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity arrives on stage. Luigi Pirandello, Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author
And, naturally, the result was what it had to be: a mixture of tragic and comic, fantastic and realistic, in a humorous situation that was quite new and infinitely complex, a drama which is conveyed by means of the characters, who carry it within them and suffer it, a drama, breathing, speaking, self-propelled, which seeks at all costs to find the means of its own presentation and the comedy of the vain attempt at an improvised realization of the drama on stage. And so let them go where dramatic characters do go to have life: on a stage. “Why not,” I said to myself, “present this highly strange fact of an author who refuses to let some of his characters live though they have been born in his fantasy, and the fact that these characters, having by now life in their veins, do not resign themselves to remaining excluded from the world of art? They are detached from me live on their own have acquired voice and movement have by themselves-in this struggle for existence that they have had to wage with me-become dramatic characters, characters that can move and talk on their own initiative already see themselves as such have learned to defend themselves against others. Analysis of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author
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