The Creative “Chaos”: Pirandello’s Theatrical Revolution

⏱ Tempo di lettura: 4 min

By Ferdinando Morabito — From the turbulent premiere of Six Characters in Search of an Author to the definitive emergence of metatheatre, Pirandello overturns the rules of dramatic representation and breaks down the separation between stage and audience. A revolution born from that creative “chaos” in which characters, actors and spectators become part of the same unsettling theatrical fiction.

▶ Pirandello in English

The Creative “Chaos”: Pirandello’s Theatrical Revolution

From Il Paese Possibile

Original Italian version: Il “caos” creativo: la rivoluzione teatrale di Pirandello

It is 9 May 1921, at the Teatro Valle in Rome. The audience has no idea what is about to happen, nor can it yet imagine the enormous significance of the work that will be performed that evening.

Before their astonished eyes, the spectators witness one of Luigi Pirandello’s most important plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello, already one of the major literary figures in Italy, would soon become one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

This extraordinary artist, born near present-day Agrigento — then known as Girgenti — came into the world in a house located in the district called “Caos”. The coincidence has often been associated with Pirandello’s own creative chaos, almost as though his birthplace had symbolically anticipated his destiny.

Pirandello’s extraordinary creative energy drove him to produce works destined to revolutionise the literary conventions of his time and to leave a profound mark on modern thought and society. Novels such as One, No One and One Hundred Thousand and The Late Mattia Pascal, together with his immense output of short stories, explore the virtues, vices and contradictions of contemporary life while opening new horizons of reflection through an extraordinary psychological investigation of their characters.

Yet alongside this vast narrative production, Pirandello devoted intense and passionate attention to the artistic form that would ultimately establish his international reputation: the theatre.

In what is generally identified as the “third phase” of Pirandello’s theatrical development, Six Characters in Search of an Author occupies a central position. The play embodies to the highest degree his desire to break down the “fourth wall”: the invisible and purely conventional barrier separating the audience from the stage.

The work was so revolutionary that its first Roman audience was bewildered. The performance provoked loud protests, whistles and the famous cries of “Manicomio! Manicomio!” — “Madhouse! Madhouse!”

The play begins with a theatre company rehearsing another Pirandello work, The Rules of the Game. The rehearsal is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of six Characters who ask the actors to perform a different story: their own.

The Characters explain that they were created by an author and then abandoned before their drama could be fully realised.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is the first work in the trilogy usually known as the “theatre within the theatre”. Although the play was not immediately successful in terms of public approval, its first performance nevertheless achieved something fundamental: it forced the spectators to become involved in the theatrical event instead of remaining passive observers.

The boundaries between stage and auditorium, actors and audience, reality and fiction were no longer secure.

Only with the 1925 edition, for which Pirandello wrote a substantial preface explaining the genesis, themes and intentions of the work, did Six Characters in Search of an Author also become a major public success.

Pirandello’s fame rapidly became international, eventually leading to the highest literary recognition: the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934.

The Swedish Academy honoured him “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art”.

Six Characters in Search of an Author remains his most representative theatrical work, the summa of his dramatic art and almost a manifesto of his inexhaustible creativity.

It established Pirandello as one of the great masters of twentieth-century theatre and gave definitive artistic form to that consciousness of fragmentation and to that theatrical — and often paradoxical — vision of existence which even today is described, in everyday language, as “Pirandellian”.

And perhaps, after all, that vision still carries something of the “Caos” in which Pirandello was born.

Ferdinando Morabito

▶ Pirandello in English

If you would like to contribute, send your material, specifying if and how you would like to be credited, to [email protected]

▶ Discover ShakespeareItalia