Six personnages en quête d'auteur

In Luigi Pirandello's most famous play, premiered in Rome in 1921, the theater looks in the mirror and thinks of itself as a fable. The plot is simple: a troupe in full rehearsal is interrupted by six characters looking for an author to write their drama. They challenge the actors' ability to play a story that isn't their own, and rekindle the eternal friction between reality and fiction. What if appearances weren't so deceptive? Would art be truer than life? Nearly a hundred years on, Pirandello's masterpiece has lost none of its acuity.

"I see the play as an attempt to put theater to death: an attack. Because there is an urgency to live or relive the drama already experienced, an urgency to rediscover its truth, the theater must disappear, with its lying lexicon and its bad-faith actors," writes Fabrice Melquiot, who here offers a new, incredibly vivid translation to put this timeless drama, which Peter Szondi described as "the quintessence of modern drama", back into play.