Already known thanks to the translation of some novels and The Late Mattia Pascal, Pirandello began his involvement in French theatre with the 1923 performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author, which was directed by Georges Pitoëff. This chapter recounts Pirandello’s fortunes in France and explores their mediation by translator Benjamin Crémieux, who helped bring the writer’s works to French readers and theatregoers. However, Pirandello’s success began a downward arc in the late 1920s due to several factors, including overexposure and French critics’ accusations of excessive cerebralism. Although Pirandello’s plays continued to be performed, they received progressively less favorable responses. The 1934 Nobel Prize, however, brought the playwright back into the limelight, and he was celebrated and applauded in January 1935 at the staging of Tonight We Improvise by the Pitoëff Company.

Georges Pitoëff, who was born in Georgia but moved to France in the 1920s and formed the Pitoëff Company with his wife Ludmilla, was one of the most important directors for Pirandello’s success in France. Pitoëff considered directing an autonomous art, in which the director is an “absolute autocrat.” His first meeting with Pirandello occurred during the staging of Six Characters in 1923 at the Champs-Elysées Theatre in Paris, in which the director famously lowered the six characters onto the stage with a freight elevator. The author, at first wary of the director’s innovations, would then establish a dialogue and friendship with him that lasted until the end of his life. The relationship was characterized by frequent misunderstandings and arguments, especially about the role of directing, and reached its culmination in 1935 with the staging of Tonight We Improvise in Paris during the celebrations for the Nobel Prize awarded to Pirandello. Pitoëff’s best-remembered Pirandello production remains his 1925 Henri IV.