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Mirror Acts: Dramatic Form in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

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Abstract
Pirandello is among the first playwrights to reshape the very notion of theatre and pave the way for a postmodern understanding of the human. By fixing one of drama’s cardinal axes—space—and making it simultaneously literal and inherently static—Pirandello frees the other—time—thereby undoing the core of the dramatic arc. This simple shift repositions both plot and characters, placing them in a cosmology which tauntingly ignores them. Their experience—and by extension the human experience—becomes inherently aimless. In this latter light, Pirandello’s characters are an anticipation of Beckett’s. While this is indubitably an important point of contact between the two, it is the similarity in their structural redefinition of spacetime, that allows both to pave the way for a pivotal revolution of form that will bloom in the works of their heirs—Pinter and Stoppard, primarily—and anticipate postdramatic theatre. In this light, Six Characters in Search of an Author, first staged in Rome and Paris in 1921 a time when Beckett would have been exposed to a response to it, plants a lasting seed.
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2024
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Sacchetti, Livia. “Mirror Acts: Dramatic Form in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.” In Samuel Beckett’s Italian Modernisms, edited by Michela Bariselli, Davide Crosara, Antonio Gambacorta, and Mario Martino, 54–71. Routledge. 2024.
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