Reviews

• had to read this book for my ital. lit. class and was pretty good. Came in good condition and easy to read.

• Luigi Pirandello's 1921 masterpiece was a pioneering piece of post-modernist theatre (which Webster's dictionary defines as, among other things, "typically characterized by ... ironic self-reference and absurdity"). It is beloved of drama schools, but as a piece of entertainment it's getting a bit dated now. This new (2007) version, by Ben Power and Rupert Goold (who directed the Stalinist Macbeth shown on BBC last year) brings the play right up to date, including topical issues that Pirandello never dreamt of. In this version, the play rehearsal of the original is replaced by a team of film-makers creating a documentary about assisted suicide. From a staging point of view, this means that screens are required on stage to display pre-recorded content. For an amateur drama society, that makes it very challenging in terms of staging, not to mention the difficult content (when I directed it last month, we had half a dozen people walk out and one serious letter of complaint, while others said it was the best thing they had ever seen. Alan Ayckbourn it isn't). I can't imagine an amateur society performing this play in its entirety without changes. My version omitted the suicide of the boy (try persuading a parent to let their 10-year old commit suicide on stage using a hypodermic needle), while the sex scene between the Father and the Stepdaughter is a very difficult thing to stage tastefully. The discussion between the Theatre-Makers and the Exec also has to be made specific to your actual production. Goold and Power have added a wholly new fourth act, where the post-modernist absurdity spirals off into strange territory, with a DVD commentary on the play that the audience has just seen and a discussion of how it is to be staged, followed by a conversation between Pirandello himself and his house-keeper on how to finish the play. Six Characters challenges us to examine how we view reality. The film-makers claim to be holding "the mirror up to nature", but recent controversies have shown that television reality is even more compromised than fiction (Peter Fincham, referenced in the script, is the BBC Controller forced to resign over footage that misleadingly seemed to show the Queen storming out of an interview in 2007). As the play progresses, we are seduced by the idea that fiction is actually more real than any reality we can perceive. We grow up, we grow old, we die. Our hair turns grey, our opinions shift, we swap Socialist Worker for the Daily Telegraph. Reality changes but fiction is eternal, and once a character's story is told he takes on a life of his own. For all its unsettling tragedy, Six Characters has a great deal of humour. But more than that, it celebrates the triumph of fiction and the creative imagination. Hamlet might not be real, but he shows us more about ourselves than Jerry Springer or Wife Swap ever will.

• Pirandello's most famous play reads and plays as though it was written today. A "concept" play that looks at the "life imitates art" concept quite literally. A family arrives at a theatre requiring actors and an author to adequately tell their despondent story and Pirandello shows art v commerce as the family, emotionally driven by truth, trying to find satisfaction in having their told by commercially driven creators and ego driven actors. The dramatic conclusion is made more powerful by the reaction of the theatre company. As a choice for production, this is in public domain, settings are minimal yet creative, a plentiful cast and two "intermissions" that allow audience to stretch and reflect in conjunction with continued action of the play during which the actors continue living, just off stage for ten to fifteen minutes; the two intervals are part of the action. The play can be set in the original period or adjusted to be set today with lap-tops and iPhones. Requiring age ranges of 5 to 60, student actors work just as well. Conversely, this is also a great read and is moving and funny as so; it feeds needs even if you've no intention of mounting a production.

• Nice book good quality bit costly

• Pirandello's brilliant play that exemplifies many of the problems central to his writing: the nature of the creative process, the conflict between art and life, the relativity of truth, and the evanescence of identity.

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