Six Characters in Search of an Author

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?

Our Review:

16 September 2008

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 tr...

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Latest User Review

rds - 8 November 2008:

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....

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