Luigi Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author (review)

With Jennifer Lorch's well-documented volume on the playwright's most famous masterpiece, Pirandello gets deserved, long-awaited attention from Cambridge University Press (its series Plays in Production had begun in 1995 with Ibsen's A Doll's House). Lorch has written an extensive examination of Six Characters in Search of an Author from its 1921 debut to its most recent and influential productions; the last one she examines is dated 2001. The first goal of her book, as stated in the preface to the series Plays in Production, is to give students, practitioners, and theatergoers a comprehensive yet detailed view of the chosen play, providing readers with historical context, reception, and analysis of successful productions. Lorch certainly delivers a study that fulfills these expectations. She has delved into archives and libraries in Italy, France, Great Britain, the United States, and Russia and retrieved documents, reviews, scholarly articles, and ephemeral printed matter tied to theater productions. Her book encompasses a summary of the laborious origin of the play from Pirandello's short stories; an impressive list of data on the casts and production artists, of the play's many influential productions; precious testimonies from actors, directors, and critics who worked with Pirandello during his active years or who were involved in the subsequent productions (particularly important are the comments of Dario Niccodemi, the capocomico [director] of the Six Characters… debut [31–43]); insights into practicalities of theater work and acting; reviews of actors' performances; and the misadventures of Six Characters in Search of an Author with the censors. In the wealth of information presented in twelve chapters, her remarkable archival work (not a novelty for Lorch, as readers appreciate from her Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre. A Documentary Record, which she co-edited in 1993) has also uncovered significant iconographic material (i.e. from the Museo dell'Attore, Genoa, Italy).

In the first half of her study, Lorch focuses on the productions of the play that for their place in the chronology and the magnitude of their directors' successful philosophical engagement with the text, still stand as touchstones for comparisons: the May 9, 1921 Rome debut (she corrects the May 10 debut date indicated in several older books, including her previously mentioned study); Pitoëff's 1923 Paris; Reinhardt's 1924 Berlin; and Pirandello's 1925 Rome productions. With philological care, Lorch records the directors' changes to Pirandello's text (cuts, additions, adaptations) but also—and here Lorch's work on documentary testimonies and on the vast body of Pirandello's bibliography shows its results—the often minute but climatic changes called for by the daily practice of acting (i.e. p. 41). Lorch discusses at length the long-debated issue of how "Characters" and actors are to be differentiated on stage—an issue that has drawn directors' attention since the first productions. This problem, presented by Lorch in its practical and theoretical frames, carries with it the determination of the nature of the "Characters": human beings (according to Pirandello's clearly stated 1925 stage directions) or phantasms (as Reinhardt interpreted them). Lorch appropriately dwells on this issue that reverberates throughout the productions of Six Characters in Search of an Author considered in her study. Another crucial theme in theater is the problem of "ownership" of a particular performance: is it to be attributed to the author or to the play's director? Lorch skillfully addresses this issue, reviewing the main directors' stances and Pirandello's changing view—from the supremacy of the author to the implicit recognition of the director's right to be the "'absolute autocrat' when it comes to staging a play" (55).

In the second half of her study Lorch reviews the major Italian productions from 1936 up until 1993; two English productions (1929, 1963); the fortuna of the play in the national tradition of France and England; traditional and eccentric European and United States productions; and the play's adaptations in other media: television, cinema...