An overtly non-realistic portrayal of society is offered in a play by Luigi Pirandello, yet this is also a play with a political analysis at its heart. Appearance versus reality is a theme that infuses Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author. The technique used by the playwright is extremely theatrical and has a long history--the play-within-a-play was used often by Shakespeare and can be found in the works of other major dramatists. The playwright often uses such a device to comment on the process of playwriting itself, showing within a performance of a play the act of creating and presenting some vision of reality in dramatic form. Pirandello's work makes this self-reflective structure the basic substance of the play and uses it to raise questions as to how we can tell when reality ends and illusion begins, or the other way round. The selfhood of his characters is less an issue given that they are types and are also actors assuming selves not their own. Their examination of their selfhood is itself a political act because it takes place in a social setting and relies on determining each individual's relationship to others in that social setting. The following will consider whether the play reflects Pirandello's political ideals as a fascist and how this might be the case. While Pirandello's political ideals may have been inherent in all his work, as might be expected, his real issues in this play are theatrical, creating an ongoing critique of the relationship between reality and the theater.
The work is highly theatrical and highly self-referential in that it is a play that involves a play, it is presented as if it were a rehearsal on a stage, and it therefore constantly calls attention to its technique, a technique it also critiques even as it is presented. Pirandello was part of the shift to modernism, a term applied retroactively to certain literary and artistic trends at the beginning of the twentie...