Chapter 21 - The Fourth Wall

Summary

Although Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is often taken as an exercise in “metatheatre,” the play in fact imagines theatre defined as a specific technological apparatus: a fully electrified house, actors expected to play “in character,” and an audience spatially and conceptually separated from the artistic performance. That is, Pirandello’s skeptical critique of theatre and theatricality is undertaken through a specific instrument, the apparatus of the modern, darkened proscenium house. This chapter explores Pirandello’s work in the context of a specific kind of technological apparatus, one in which the thematics of critique are specifically managed by the ideological disposition of modern theatre design and signaled most effectively by its tools, notably by the rhetorical assertion of the proscenium as a “fourth wall” and by the ways lighting articulates its function in the making of dramatic performance.