Edinburgh Fringe Festival
This production of Six Characters In Search Of An Author at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is by Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club and the tagline on the flyer is ‘Come along if you have the time – after all, it’s only a show.’
Don’t you think that this character looks exactly like someone in search of an author?
Six Characters In Search Of An Author
The play Six Characters In Search Of An Author by the Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello was first performed in 1921 in Rome to an audience whose reaction was to cry out ‘Madhouse!’
The plot involves a director who is rehearsing a play when six characters wander in looking for an author.
They convince the director to include their characters in his play and then proceed to argue with him about the direction the play will take.
They also complain that they are not too impressed with the quality of the acting by the actors.
The play ends with the director not knowing what is real and what is not, but certain in the knowledge that he has wasted a day.
From a distance, the plot of Six Characters seems absurd and funny. But the play the actors are rehearing when the characters happen by is another play by Luigi Pirandello, written two or three years earlier.
It is The Rules Of The Game, a play in which a man empties himself of all emotion when he discovers his wife is having an affair, and gets his revenge on his wife’s lover, who is killed.
So the play that is the ostensible centrepiece of Six Characters, is in fact a serious psychological drama.
Luigi Pirandello
In recognition of his literary achievements Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.
He is sometimes seen as the father of the theatre of the absurd, central to which is the question of how to deal with a world apparently without meaning.
As inheritors of the theatre of the absurd, of Samuel Beckett, and of Monty Python, Six Characters In Search Of An Author may not seem that off the wall to us.
But in the Rome of 1921, it was ‘Madhouse!’
