Six personnages en quête d'auteur

Master of the theater within the theater, Luigi Pirandello's play, first performed in Rome in 1921, offers a novel plot: a team (actors and actresses, director and stage manager) laboriously rehearsing is suddenly interrupted by six characters forming a particularly dysfunctional family, in search of an author capable of writing their story.

Pirandello has the ingenious idea of doubling the family's conflicting relationships with another type of dispute: the characters rebel against the false truth of the actors and actresses playing their story and their inability to embody it. Marina Hands, in her first solo staging, sees in this pressing desire to be "embodied" a questioning of our age, a frenetic race for self-representation.
"What is a stage? [...] it's a place where you play to play for real," says Pirandello to one of the characters. With an unconditional love of the Italian playwright's work, she makes it her own in an immersive staging, the two-front set-up placing the audience at the center of the tumult. In the spirit of the author, Marina Hands imagines how far the feeling of real life will break into the theater. Constantly searching for the meaning of her profession, she questions, through this fictional creative team and against a backdrop of fragility in the theatrical world, what underpins the necessity of this art form, for artists and audiences alike.