pirandello six characters in search of an author

Without giving a second thought, the audience understands that this is an absurd play as the characters are off-beat and their story is hard to keep up. Six Characters in Search of an Author: Mathias Wiemann (left), Lucie Hoeflich (centre), Franziska Kinz (right), 1924 staging at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin, directed by Max Reinhardt The Manager takes interest in their story and orders the set to be arranged for its rehearsal after a 20 minutes break.

Their story ends with the Child drowning, Boy shooting himself and Step-Daughter fleeing. After this reveal, the Mother along with her three children re-enter the family of her ex-husband and Son. One of her clients happens to be the Father and before anything happens, the Mother walks in on them and tells Step-Daughter that her client is her ex-husband. When the man dies, The Mother and her family goes broke so the Step-Daughter has to work in a brothel to look after the family. Their story goes like this: the Father and the Mother separate after having their Son and the Mother has three other kids from another man. The Father, the Mother, Step-Daughter, Son, Boy and Child are the characters that need an author to tell their tragic story. The director of the play, annoyed but intrigued, lets them explain why they’re there. The play starts off with six people interrupting a theatre rehearsal, saying that they’re six characters in search of an author. Six Authors in Search of an Author is the epitome of an absurdist play as it, first, overwhelms the reader with its chaotic nature and then, dives into presenting existentialist themes like the concept of self and reality versus illusion. Thus, his contributions to the short-lived theatrical movement made him a pioneer and allowed him to display his complex and controversial ideas in his plays. Luigi Pirandello, the author of Six Authors in Search of an Author, did not only follow his fellow absurdist playwrights’ existentialist ideas but also introduced the method of play-within-a-play to the Theatre of Absurd. Absurdist playwrights like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who were influenced by existentialists, started to embrace the disorder in the world and make something out of it.

Existentialists tried to understand the cruelty of the meaningless of life and tried to expose the crisis that it caused in the human beings. This post-war trauma resulted in the existential philosophy called as existentialism. People were so deranged because of the endless wars that they started to question God and their reason for being on Earth. Though, it reached its peak in 50’s France as a reaction to WW2. First coined by Martin Esslin in 1961, Theatre of Absurd goes way back to the 1920’s when avant-garde experimental works started to emerge.

Pirandello six characters in search of an author