Didascalie e apparizioni. Shaw, Pirandello, Mann

The exponential growth of the use of captions in European drama between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century is examined here, starting from Ibsen, in the relationship between George Bernard Shaw and Luigi Pirandello. The topic – removing it from the perspective of the centrality of stage direction (called “regìa” in the Italian tradition of theatre studies) - is focused in the direction that Shaw defines as the “competition of fiction” of dramaturgy, in reference to the book. Even the relationship with the figure of the director – for Pirandello relating above to Questa sera si recita a soggetto and the Ger- man experience – is redefined in the complex and contradictory relationship with the declared theoretical instances, in a broader perspective of “apparition”, and especially of “diabolic apparition”, which also in- troduces the role of a third protagonist of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann.