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:

19 February 2001

This bold, breathtaking production of Pirandello's 1921 play, usually known as Six Characters in Search of an Author re-titles the play Six Characters Looking for an Author, for no good reason except perhaps to point up that it is an entirely new version that has been created by the young playwright David Harrower.

But it's the dazzling director Richard Jones - in one of his now too infrequent forays back to the theatrical stage from the operatic one upon which he usually plies his often controversial but always intriguing trade - who turns what is sometimes an aridly pretentious drama into a supremely agile, provocative one.

Famously influential in the theatrical movement known as the Theatre of the Absurd, Pirandello's play - in which six characters from an unfinished play disrupt the rehearsals for another one and demand that the actors listen to, then complete, their stories - is a fantasia on themes of the differences between ill...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 8 March 2001:

Wonderfully directed and imaginatively staged. The use of side lighting on the shallow but curved back wall was brilliant. The audience could see what was happening at both ends of the wide stage at the same time! The acting was beautifully paced and each character meticulously observed. A real treat. ...

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