Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre
Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre

Author: Susan Bassnett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-18

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1134351143

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First Published in 1993. Contemporary Theatre Studies is a book series of special interest to everyone involved in theatre. This collection of documents is the first attempt in English to bring together a body of material on Luigi Pirandello as multi-faceted man of the theatre. Because relatively few of his works have been easily available to English language readers, he is thought of most frequently as a playwright, the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV in particular, and his contribution to theatre, both in theory and in practice, has tended to be overlooked. Emphasising his role as a director, the book traces the rise and fall of his own theatre company, the Teatro d’Arte where he struggled to instil new practices and comments on Pirandello’s attempts during the years of Fascism to give Italy a national theatre in a European context.

Pirandello's Henry IV
Pirandello's Henry IV

Author: Luigi Pirandello

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2011-05-16

Total Pages: 83

ISBN-13: 0802195342

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The Italian playwright’s masterful comedy interrogating the meaning of madness is reimagined in this translation by the author of Leopoldstadt. In this meeting of two of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights, Tom Stoppard has reinvigorated Luigi Pirandello’s masterpiece exploring the nature of madness and the limits of sanity. After a fall from his horse, an Italian aristocrat believes he is the obscure medieval German emperor Henry IV. After twenty years of living this royal illusion, his beloved appears with a noted psychiatrist to shock the madman back to sanity. Their efforts expose that for the past twelve years the nobleman has in fact been sane. With his mask of madness unveiled, the aristocrat launches an offensive to deflect their unwanted attention. While Pirandello’s characters verbally spar in Stoppardian flourishes, battling for the upper hand—and the greatest laughs—one question emerges: What constitutes sanity?