Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life--only to find that this new existence is as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he left behind, it's too late: his job is gone, his wife has remarried. Mattia Pascal's fate is to live on as the ghost of the man he was.
An explorer of identity and its mysteries, a connoisseur of black humor, Nobel Prize...

Pirandello's play was made into a film in 1932 starring Greta Garbo.

Pirandello's classic play updated for the twenty-first century by the team behind Faustus.

Blurring the border between fiction and life, between the stage and the world outside, Six Characters in Search of an Author exploded onto the stage in 1921 as one of the unique achievements of twentieth-century drama.

Updated and recontextualised in this vertiginous new version, it becomes a dark parable for a media-obsessed age and an exhilarating exploration of how we define art, ourselves and 'reality' in the twenty-first century.

'Six Characters in search of an Author' is a is a satirical tragicomedy play. First performed in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, it had a very mixed reception, with the audience shouting "Manicomio " ("Madhouse "). However, the reception improved significantly and in 1922 it played on Broadway at the Princess Theatre. The play starts with a group of actors preparing to rehearse for a Pirandello play. The rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival of six characters. One of then informs the manager that they are looking for an author. He explains that the author who created them did not finish...

First published in 1915 in Italian, Luigi Pirandellos Shoot! follows the life of fictional Italian camera operator Serafino Gubbio during the heady days of early motion pictures. Gubbios journal allows Pirandello to grapple with modernist themes of isolation and madness.

A young woman attempts suicide - but she's found before the poison can kill her. A journalist becomes interested in her life, then a novelist - stories circulate, more people are drawn in, and even the Foreign Office tries to intervene. An adaptatio

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR * HENRY IV * THE MOUNTAIN GIANTS
Pirandello ranks with Strindberg, Brecht, and Beckett as a seminal figure in modern drama. Innovative and influential, he broke decisively with the conventions of realist theatre to foreground the tensions between art and reality. In his best known play, six characters, imagined but then abandoned by their author, intrude on the rehearsals of a provincial theatre company in an attempt to play out their family drama. In the brilliant Henry IV, a young man believes himself to be the Holy Roman Emperor; attempts to cure...

He wears a mask - he pretends to be an idling, strolling observer of others: an amused spectator. He watches people on the street, in shops, in cafes: wherever he finds them he notes their peculiarities and imagines their lives. Like a naturalist with a bone of an unknown creature, he extrapolates and forms an entire animal in his minds eye. It is his joy; it is his defence: he revels in life, so as to ignore death. For its shadow lies over him.

A man is convinced his daughter is a genius and he drives her on and on until she has no choice but to reveal herself for what she is. "It is not a tragedy in the sense of confrontation and collision, but in the sense of a man overwhelmed by his fate. It is a classical tragedy in the guise of a middle class drama." Roberto Alonge

A unique collection of short stories by the master of Italian modernism.