Who are they, these six characters who enter a theatre disturbing a rehearsal underway? Six members of the same family, in search of an author who would like to finish the work started by a writer who had not “finished” them, and who therefore had not finished the narrative of their fictional adventures. This story, this unfinished story, has become the emblem of Pirandello's theatre, this theatre that constantly questions itself, this “theatre in the theatre” that is built like a system of Russian dolls that are ceaselessly uncovered one after the other. The spectator barely believes that he has managed to unravel the true from the false, fiction from reality, when he is repudiated by successive dramatic turns of events, because the real, in Pirandello's extremely humorous theatre, can “not be true but always be possible.” Stéphane Braunschweig returns to the Sicilian author to install him, with all his characters, in a theatre of today, and has him meet the actors of today, who raise questions on the theatre that is possible and necessary to do in this period of crises and upheavals. Based on improvisational work with his actors, he imagined rewriting part of the play and also taking his inspiration from the adaptation for the cinema that Pirandello wrote a few years later. Whereas in the play the author shines by his absence, in the script, it is paradoxically this figure of the author that becomes central, an author grappling with the figures of his imagination. A way for Stéphane Braunschweig to once again question the enigmatic hub of the play: so why did the author “reject” these characters who were however persuaded that they brought with them “a powerful, new and complex drama”? Would they be less “interesting” or less universal than they said? Or would they be “disturbing” for the author himself because they reveal, despite him, a secret part of his intimacy? Mysterious modesty of the author, vital immodesty of the characters; Pirandello's “theatre questions” meet headlong our period of public overexposure of the intimate. JFP
It was in 1921 that Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) published the first version of his Six Characters in Search of an Author, a play that he reworked several times until 1933. It develops a recurring theme in the Sicilian playwright's work: the theatre in the theatre. It was a failure when it was premiered in Rome, before triumphing, a month later, in Milan, then New York. It subsequently became a major work in the career of the author who received, in 1934, the Nobel Prize fin Literature “for his bold and ingenious renewal of the art of drama and the stage.”
Distribution
adaptation, direction
and scenography Stéphane Braunschweig
costumes Thibault Vancraenenbroeck
lighting Marion Hewlett
artistic collaboration Anne-Françoise Benhamou
collaboration to the scenography Alexandre de Dardel
sound Xavier Jacquot
video Sébastien Marrey
assistant to the direction Pauline Ringeade, Catherine Umbdenstock
with Elsa Bouchain, Christophe Brault, Caroline Chaniolleau, Claude Duparfait, Philippe Girard, Anthony Jeanne, Maud Le Grévellec, Anne-Laure Tondu, Manuel Vallade, Emmanuel Vérité
Production
production La Colline - national theater Paris
coproduction Festival d'Avignon
Through its support, the Adami helps the Festival d'Avignon to get involved in coproductions.