Synopsis Six characters appear on a stage that is being used for the rehearsal of a Pirandello play. They ask the Stage Manager for help. Created and then discarded by an author, they seek another author to cast them in a play and let them play out their roles. A group of actors steps forward to portray the lives that the six characters have just described, but when they do so the characters object to their re-enactment, claiming that it distorts the truth. When one of the characters commits suicide, the rest of the characters mourn his death while the actors insist nervously that it is only make believe. Which is it? And how will the situation be resolved? A new version by Rupert Goold and Ben Power. 2 hours 20 minutes
Rupert Goold’s production of Pirandello’s seminal 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author transferred to the West End this week (Monday 15 September 2008, previews from 10 September), opening at the Gielgud Theatre for a limited season until 8 November (See 1st Night Photos, 16 Sep 2008).
The co-production from Headlong Theatre, of which Goold is artistic director, was first seen in July at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre, where Goold’s award-laden Patrick Stewart-led Macbeth began last summer ahead of its transfer to the Gielgud and on to Broadway.
Goold and co-adapter Ben Power have updated the play to cater for the “media-obsessed age” of the 21st century (See News, 29 Jan 2008). In the exploration of reality and the blurred border between fiction and life, between the stage and the world outside, six characters arrive unannounced during the editing of a documentary film. Unfinished characters desperately in search of an author, the documentary producer agrees to let them film their story.
The cast is led by former Almeida joint artistic director Ian McDiarmid (pictured), who was taken ill shortly after the press performance but is expected back next week (See Today's Other News). He is joined by Jamie Bower, Eleanor David, Noma Dumezweni, Dyfan Dwyfor, Christine Entwisle, Denise Gough, Jake Harders, Jeremy Joyce, John Mackay and Robin Pearce. Six Characters in Search of an Author is designed by Mariam Beuther, with lighting by Malcolm Rippeth, video by Lorna Heavey and sound by Adam Cork.
Critical reactions were even warmer for the West End transfer than those that greeted the original Chichester run. The reason for this cited by the Guardian’s Michael Billington (who saw it in both venues) is the suitability of the Gielgud’s proscenium-arch layout for “this most meta-theatrical of plays”. Critics cheered the production for providing a “boldness seldom encountered in the West End”, as well as lauding a “powerful” array of performances (particularly the “outstanding” Ian McDiarmid). But most column inches were taken up by praise for director Rupert Goold, heralded variously as “exhilaratingly imaginative” and the “hottest director on the theatrical block”.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (three stars) – “Pirandello’s modernist masterpiece Six Characters in Search of an Author was once known as the bohemian shocker of the 1920s and the first challenge to any revival is that of re-inventing that lost sense of provocation in a theatre culture where nothing can be all that new any more. In this regard, there is no faulting the work of the Headlong and Chichester Festival Theatre team … The National used Hamlet as their play-within-a-play 20 years ago in a more sedately ‘English’ version and Goold and Power have some fun with our national hobby of reducing European classics. But the show lacks the overpowering style and elegance of the great Russian production by Anatol Vassiliev that came to LIFT many years ago; this is a play, au fond, as much about longing and yearning as it is about dark instincts, and we are only getting here half the story.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (four stars) – “I was lukewarm about this free version of Pirandello's 1921 classic when I saw it at Chichester this summer. If I respond more keenly to the transfer, it is partly because this most meta-theatrical of plays works best inside a proscenium-arch. But it is also because the raw Oedipal power of Rupert Goold's production transcends the ingenious framework he has devised with Ben Power … The Pirandellian core is there; and I find it more compelling than the dilemma of the TV Producer drawn into the family's narrative. Although Noma Dumezweni lends the character intensity, her adventures in the additional last act supplied by Goold and Power come to seem superfluous. She stumbles, clutching a dead child, into a performance of Les Mis and ultimately we see her become the physical victim of Pirandello's characters. It's very clever. But what counts is the way Goold's production captures the chaos and pain of the disruptive family and the dark fear that lies at the heart of Pirandello's play.”
Benedict Nightingale in The Times (four stars) – “Is Rupert Goold, now the hottest director on the theatrical block, a maverick genius or a self-indulgent upstart? His ultra-fussy revival of Macbeth left me taking the more churlish view; but his staging of Pirandello's best-known play, which I first caught at Chichester in July, more than merits its transfer. I haven't seen a more exhilaratingly imaginative revival of a modern classic since Stephen Daldry raised Priestley's Inspector Calls from the grave … What also struck me was Goold's ability to get powerful performances from his actors, notably from Denise Gough, whose Stepdaughter exudes smouldering scorn and Ian McDiarmid, who doesn't quite catch the Father's inner guilt but is still an impressively sardonic, sinister figure … I was left mentally waving a white flag - while cheering a boldness seldom encountered in the West End.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (four stars) - “Six Characters is recreated and given relevance for a world eager to turn a blind eye to television’s blurring of the lines between reality and illusion. Goold has charged it with its original existential mystery and visceral excitements. The elements of family breakdown, marital collapse and suicide acquire a chilling potency … In the Goold-Power version, the funereally-dressed sextet, led by Ian McDiarmid’s flamboyant, cane-flourishing Father, intrudes on a film-editing studio in Denmark. Here, Noma Dumezweni’s Producer, two actors and technicians view extracts from the drama documentary they are making about mercy-killing and a terminally-ill 14-year-old who has chosen to die … Goold stages these scenes of familial disintegration to shocking effect. A procurer leaps from under the brothel bed like some human jack-in-the-box. Denise Gough’s terrific Stepdaughter, a mocking, sexually provocative, lipsticked presence, stripped by McDiarmid’s icily functional Father, dons her Lolita dress and Eleanor David’s outraged Mother bursts in on them. To Adam Cork’s eerie, Berg-like music the trio sing howling, wordless arias of grief and rage.”
NOTE: The following review was in response to the original run at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre.
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph – “Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) is one of the great works of 20th-century modernism … But though the Italian dramatist's experiments with the concepts of truth and illusion, and his ability to combine intellect with raw emotion, remain highly influential, the play itself is rarely revived. The dialogue has gathered dust, the theatrical folk he portrays belong to another age, and there are moments that seem floridly melodramatic. Rupert Goold has clearly taken all this on board in his extraordinary new production, which might offend purists but which seems to me to get to the heart of Pirandello's meaning while making the old play seem fresh to a modern audience … This latest piece confirms Goold as the most exciting director of his generation … Ian McDiarmid is outstanding as the Father, by turns witty, urbane, sinister and anguished … And there is strong support from Denise Gough as the bitter, abused Stepdaughter, looking like something out of Clockwork Orange, and John Mackay as a persuasively vile TV executive.”
Pirandello’s modernist masterpiece Six Characters in Search of an Author was once known as the bohemian shocker of the 1920s and the first challenge to any revival is that of re-inventing that lost sense of provocation in a theatre culture where nothing can be all that new any more.
In this regard, there is no faulting the work of the Headlong and Chichester Festival Theatre team of director Rupert Goold, his co-adaptor Ben Power or designers Miriam Buether (sets), Malcolm Rippeth (lighting), Adam Cork (music and sound) and Lorna Heavey (video and projections). They take a piece about conflicting levels of artifice into a new area of television documentary realism as substitute for theatrical story-telling.
And what is absolutely new is the idea that documentary footage might be boosted by the incorporation of actual tragedy, in the way that some recent television programmes have ironically undermined their message by being too truthful. The producer (Noma Dumezweni) is in trouble with her bosses for not getting the full story on a family travelling to Denmark to arrange the death of their own son in a suicide clinic.
Enter the six characters led by Ian McDiarmid’s chilling dark-suited paedophile – too many shows are fashionably falling for child abuse these days, but here the criminal perversion unlocks a central mystery in Pirandello – his operatically Italianate wife (Eleanor David), the Lolita-ish step-daughter (Denise Gough) and the depressive son (Dyfan Dwyfor).
They fit the programme maker’s requirements like a glove, and the haunting scenes of the father’s encounter with his own daughter in a brothel, and the death of a child in a moonlit garden, are replayed as demonstrations of dysfunctional behaviour in extremis. The fish tank in which a girl symbolically drowns is enlarged by lighting to contain them all. And the producer finds herself trapped in a theatrical nightmare as she rushes from the stage (on film) into next door’s backstage barricades in Les Miserables.
The National used Hamlet as their play-within-a-play twenty years ago in a more sedately “English” version and Goold and Power have some fun with our national hobby of reducing European classics. But the show lacks the overpowering style and elegance of the great Russian production by Anatol Vassiliev that came to LIFT many years ago; this is a play, au fond, as much about longing and yearning as it is about dark instincts, and we are only getting here half the story, rather like the producer herself.
- Michael Coveney
NOTE: The following FOUR STAR review dates from this production's original run at the Chichester Festival theatre, 09 July 2008.
“What is truth?” asked a curious Pilate of Jesus. It is also a question raised by the despairing documentary producer towards the end of Rupert Goold’s exhilarating and free-form adaption of Pirandello’s modernist masterpiece.
Goold’s brilliant idea is to change Pirandello’s original text, in which a theatre company has its play rehearsal interrupted, to tell the story of a TV documentary team whose film about a young man going to a suicide clinic in Denmark to end his life, is dismissed by a TV executive as not being real enough. At this point, the eponymous six characters walk in, looking for an author to tell their story. We’re then taken on a roller-coaster ride that just touches on Pirandello’s original text but along the way explores such fundamental questions as the gap between real-life and its presentation – “the shadow between the idea and the reality” as Eliot puts it.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the production is the way that Goold subverts Hamlet (by way of Festen). Initially, we see the suicide of a young man in Denmark but when the characters tell their story, it’s apparent that this is another strand of the Hamlet plot with a step-daughter mourning her own father and seeing her mother married to a man who’s abusing her.
As the two central Characters: Ian McDiarmid is a chillingly creepy child abuser, as Prospero-like, he manipulates his family and the film crew with a wave of his stick. Denise Gough as the abused step-daughter is intensely compelling, her drawn, pale face capturing the horror of her story. John Mackay is also excellent as both the boorish TV executive and the leering pimp Mr Pace – changed from the Mrs Pace of the original. There’s some compelling lighting work from Malcolm Rippeth too.
Goold is a director with more outlandish ideas in one production than some directors have in a lifetime. Sometimes he does go too far: there’s a completely unnecessary scene in which the harassed producer, convincingly played by Noma Dumazweni, leaves the theatre and is seen on a video screen supposedly interrupting The Music Man next door. There’s also a very self-indulgent cameo by Goold and fellow adapter Ben Power, full of theatrical in-jokes that doesn’t fit in at all with the rest of the production.
But this remains an extraordinarily compelling evening at the theatre. On the way to the show, I was worried whether this once avant-garde work would look like a museum–piece: I needn’t have worried, this is a work that is as up-to-date as it could possibly be. And for all its faults, there probably won’t be a many more visually exciting pieces of theatre in the UK this year.
Five stars for the sheer audacity of the writers, the director and the actors who performed this surreal piece based around Pirendello's classic play. They kept the audience at the matinee I attended entranced, either that or, to use a common parlance, Gobsmacked! I thoroughly enjoyed it and judging by the bravos and cheers, from the almost full house, many more did too. I tried desperately to understand what was happening, which I hope to some degree I did, but anyway I can read it up later. Very good performances and one brilliant one from The Master, Ian MacDiarmid, made for a very weird, but very enjoyable wet Saturday afternoon. Mr MacDiarmid can mix sarcastic with sincerity and come up with sinister. He deserves the Best Actor Olivier this year for his performance. It's a pity it only had a couple of months in Town - it deserves longer. - rds
08 Nov 08
My head has been well and truly f****d by the changes that have been made to this play to modernise it.
A twisting and turning narrative where nothing is as it seems and concentration is required to keep on top of all of the shifts of emphasis and narrative technique but it goes on for at least one ending too long, and the Producer carrying the child scene is overlong but somehow it all hangs together and I think my perception of reality has been shattered. Thought Provoking but flawed.
....and kudos to the Step-Daughter for managing to stay on her feet in those rollerskates. - QuincyMD
28 Oct 08
a big mess. some striking moments and images, and good acting - but no intellectual coherence, no argument - power and goold just throw together a set of conflicting realities (with no consistent sense of how they relate to each other) and try to work the old trick of mentioning ideas and hoping that people will assume they actually have something to say.. - fred
25 Oct 08
Unreviewable due to the appalling bevaviour of a large group of kids who had no idea how to behave in a theatre or any understanding of what they were watching. For the first time ever I was forced to leave at the interval. Shame on them, the adults supposedly supervising them and Delfont Mackintosh for encouraging such a rowdy group to see a difficult and challenging play which demands concentration. - David Baxter
23 Oct 08
Tremendous! A real theatrical treat with not a trace of a reality tv contestant within. Fine acting and such imaginative direction and staging! The first half, though, is too long and sags but after the interval the show stuns and intrigues. Catch it while you can! - Carrie Cohen
23 Oct 08
It is not for everyone and its not perfect. However, if you like theatre which engages the mind, this must be one of the best things to see in London and in the West End! I only wish the NT could produce something as entertaining. - CAA
03 Oct 08
ASTONISHING THEATRICAL TREAT PACKED WITH PYROTECHNIC SURPRISES,SEXUAL PROVOCATION,BROAD COMEDY, AND WEIRD WICKEDNESS. USE OF FILM AND TELEVISION - AND SONIC THRILLS - INGENIOUS. A GRIPPING EXPERIENCE FOR ALL THEATRE LOVERS. - Adam Green
25 Sep 08
Such are the twists of this wonderful staging that one wouldn't have been altogether surprised if a Character turned out to be a Character's understudy - unfortunately this was the real world due to the indisposition of Ian MacDiarmid. But, after a couple of nervous moments early on, the production flowed with dark power and invention. The second half was a tour de force, constantly challenging you to reappraise the nature of the dramatic form whilst never neglecting that the primary role of theatre is to entertain. And the scene when the girl falls in the water - the tension in the audience is palpable. How did they do that?? - Robbie
23 Sep 08
I've always loved this play and I love the work of the co-adapter / director of this revival, so I was possibly over-excited at the outset. How much of my disappointment at the interval was due to Ian MacDairmid's under-cast and under-prepared understudy I don't know - it was certainly clunky and just didn't flow well; hardly a trademark of Rupert Gould. The second part turned out to be a masterpiece of staging (unaffected by the understudy as he hardly speaks), which redeemed the evening somewhat. When you see that slip fall out of the programme you normally groan but ultimately leave the theatre pleasantly surprised. On this occasion, I left annoyed that the producers hadn't properly planned for the illness of the actor in such a pivotal role. Two stars for the first part and five for the second. - Gareth James
Originally opened 27Dec 1906 as The Hicks Theatre. Formerly The Globe, renamed in 1994 in part in tribute to Sam Wanamaker, so that his dream of a new Shakespeare Globe would be the only Globe in London. 983 seats. Society of London Theatre member. In 1999 Delfont Mackintosh Theatres Limited acquired the freehold of the Queen s and the Gielgud Theatres from Christ s Hospital, Horsham. The lease of the Gielgud Theatre will revert back from Really Useful Theatres to Delfont Mackintosh Theatres in March 2006 after which there are plans to refurbish both venues and to build a 500-seat theatre, The Sondheim, above the Queen s. This will be the first new theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue since 1931.
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