Four plays by the award-winning Italian playwright and innovator Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer and winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. In the first performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author, an enraged Rome theatre audience yelled abuse at the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello and chased him out of the theatre. Since then, the play has gained iconic status as a piece of theatre which helped move Western culture into modernity. This stunning, full-cast collection of the playwright’s most famous plays performed for radio is not to be missed.

Six Characters in Search of an Author - Luigi Pirandello's famous 1921 play about the nature of theatre and the problems of theatricality, in which six characters, whose author has abandoned them mid-process, turn up at a rehearsal and demand to be played by the actors present to resolve their tragedy and become ‘real’. This contrast between art, which is unchanging, and life, which is in constant flux, is classic Pirandello.

The Rules of the Game - Set in an Italian town in 1919. Leone and Silia, man and wife, live apart, and Guido is Silia's lover. There is an uncanny lack of jealousy on Leone's part, for he seems a man without any emotional cares whatever - to him it is all a game. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a dangerous game...

Henry IV - A madman is shut up in a villa in Italy following an accident at a carnival. Twenty years later his friends come to visit him. Is he still mad, or is he sane? What is madness? What is sanity? This compelling production explores what lies just underneath the skin of ordinary life, starring Martin Jarvis and Andrew Sachs.

First Night is an adaptation of Pirandello’s 1900 short story narrated by Mary Wimbush (Poldark, Jeeves and Wooster, The Archers). It tells the story of Marastella, a young Sicilian bride who is unhappily married off to a much older man and explores convention, desire and fate.

Rounding off this curated collection we hear a bonus edition of The Forum, presented by Rajan Datar. On the centenary of the infamous premiere of Pirandello’s Six Characters, he asks: But what of the author? He was a complex figure who found inspiration from his wife’s madness as well as the actors he worked with. Datar is joined by celebrated academics and experts in this enigmatic and culture phenomenon.

This star-studded collection is perfect for any fans of Pirandello or anyone wanting to dive deeper into a genre defining era of twentieth century theatre and the man behind it.


Cast and credits
Written by Luigi Pirandello

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Adapted by Barry Campbell
Directed by Walter Acosta

Producer - Charles Grey
Daughter - Cherie Lunghi
Father - Emerald James

First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 23rd - 14th Jun 1986


The Rules of the Game

Adapted by Robert Rietty and Noel Cregeen
Directed by Brian Miller

Leone - Robert Rietty
Silia - Sarah Badel
Guido - Francis Matthews
Clara - Wendy Fisher
Marquis Miglioriti - James Goode
First drunk - Anthony Morse
Second drunk - Ken Cumberlidge
Third drunk - Haydn Andrews
Philip - Brian Hewlett
Dr Spiga - Stephen Hattersley
Barelli - Eric Stovell

First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 23rd May 1987

Henry IV

Adapted by Martin Jenkins
Translated by Frederick May
Directed by Brian Miller

Henry IV - Alec McCowan
Tito Belcredi - George Baker
Doctor Genoni - Maurice Denham
Matilda Spina - Pauline Letts
Landolph - Martin Jarvis
Ordulph - Henry Knowles
Charles di Nolli - Sean Arnold
Frida, his fiancee - Janet Chappell
Berthold - David Spenser
Harold - Nigel Lambert
John - James Thomason
The two servants - Harvey Edwards & Andrew Sachs

First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 23rd May 1978


First Night

Translated by Randolph Morse
Produced by Jenyth Worsley

Narrator - Mary Wimbush

First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 16th Oct 1980


The Forum

Presented by Rajan Datar
Readings by Marco Gambino
Produced by Anne Khazam
With: Guido Bonsaver, Dr Enza de Francisci, Patricia Gaborik

First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 2nd Sep 2021


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