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Pirandello's plays are a daring exploration of human actions and the dark motives lying behind them, and the culmination of the naturalistic school of theater inaugurated by authors such as Ibsen and Chekhov.This selection of plays by Luigi Pirandello contains some of his best-known works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author--an absurdist piece in which the characters, actors and Pirandello himself interact during the rehearsal of a fictional play within the play--and Henry IV--a tragicomic tale of a man who falls from a horse and believes himself to be the eponymous Holy Roman Emperor.
Preoccupied with the nature of truth and delusion, and treading dangerously on the borderline between sanity and madness, Pirandello's plays are a daring exploration of human actions and the dark motives lying behind them, and the culmination of the naturalistic school of theater inaugurated by authors such as Ibsen and Chekhov.
About the author
Luigi Pirandello was born in Sicily in 1867 and died in Rome in 1936, where he had first settled as a professional writer in 1893. The following year he married a woman whose mental health collapsed in 1904 leading finally to her commitment to an asylum in 1919. he was already well-known as a novelist and critic before achieving international recognition as a playwright with
Absolutely! (Perhaps) - originally translated as
Right You Are! (If You Think You Are) in 1917,
The Rules of the Game (1918),
Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921),
Henry IV (1922),
The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (1923),
As You Desire Me (1930),
Each in His Own Way (1924) and
Tonight We Improvise (1929), the last two forming a trilogy with
Six Characters. Of his forty-three plays, over half are adaptations from his own short stories written during the most difficult period of his life (1910-1918). He established and directed his own theatre in Rome, the Teatro D'Arte (1925-1928), and in 1934 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Summary
Pirandello's plays are a daring exploration of human actions and the dark motives lying behind them, and the culmination of the naturalistic school of theatre inaugurated by authors such as Ibsen and Chekhov.
