Pirandello jako widz zawodowy

Abstract

Pirandello as professional spectatorAbstractLuigio Pirandello’s drama were unfailingly popular with Polish directors between the beginningof the 1960s until the 1970s. Native creators have undertaken dramas from differentperiods of the Nobelist’s output and covering various topics – bourgeois comedy to metatheatricalworks. Most probably those do not include all that were staged then.It appears that an increased interest in the author is to be connected with the 25th anniversaryof his death, as is suggested by Mieczysław Brahmer in the 1961 Tak jest, jak się państwu zdaje(directed by Zofia Wiercińska).The fact that both then and now critics and researchers in the majority of cases assumed, notnecessarily consciously, they are writing about an artist that is mainly a writer and only thena critic of stage productions of his dramas and a stage producer for his own texts is significant.As a consequence they focused mainly on deconstructing the “pirandellism” condemned byBrahmer, in particular on its canonical interpretation by Adrian Tilgher. Therefore, the followingquestion comes to mind: what kind of interpretations are possible when Pirandello’sworks (especially the first part of the so-called trilogy of “theatre in a theatre” which consistsof Six Characters in Search of an Author, Each In His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise) areconsidered from the perspective of purpose, that is individual theatrical activity of Pirandelloas a co-founder, principal and stage producer of Teatro D’Arte in Rome (in operation between1924 and 1928). The present article attempts at showing the possible direction of a search foran answer to said question with the starting point being the 1962 production of Sześć postaciscenicznych w poszukiwaniu autora (Six Characters in Search of an Author) directed by MariaWiercińska in Stefan Jaracz Theatre in Łódź.Keywords: Pirandello in Poland, Maria Wiercińska, first theatre directors in Italy