Six Characters Looking for an Author
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::L2123497624}, 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 illusion and reality, art and artifice. But Jones, whose production
sees the six characters inhabiting more cruelly realistic lives than the
exaggerated, camply theatrical ones being lived by the actors, is an expert
at creating a jarring theatrical landscape that is at once intensely of the
theatre yet also transcends it.
Here, these include filmic references – entering a completely re-configured
Young Vic auditorium, with gilded chairs lined up in neat, raked rows
facing a white screen, you feel you may be about to watch a movie. And so it
begins – and ends – with a film projection (and, without spoiling it, quite
the cleverest curtain call I’ve seen in years). As the characters burst out
from behind the screen of a slide show that the play’s director is giving
his cast, it also recalls the similar wonderful device that Woody Allen
used in Purple Rose of Cairo in which the screen actors stepped out
of their movie roles and into ‘real’ life.
As stunningly acted by a highly accomplished cast, including Beverley
Klein, Liza Sadovy and Dale Rapley amongst the actors of
the show-within-the-show being staged by a director (Darrel D’Silva)
and his hilariously ruffled assistant (Catherine Malone), and
Stephen Boxer, Yolanda Vasquez and Leah Muller as the
principal family members whose disturbing story the actors seek to realise
on stage, this is one of the cleverest productions in town right now. Not to
be missed.
