Absolutely! {perhaps}

“This doesn’t make any sense,” is the opening line of Absolutely! {perhaps}, a Luigi Pirandello comedy first seen in 1917 that continues to live up to, or {perhaps} down to, that statement for the next alternately playful and tortuous two hours.

Revived in a supremely elegant and sumptuous but mostly pointless new production, this proves either that producers are getting more adventurous in their attempts to seduce a West End audience – or more foolish. On the one hand, how interesting it is to see this early, rarely seen Pirandello that preceded his most celebrated plays, The Rules of the Game, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, all of which have had important revivals in London in the past two decades.

On the other hand, how wearying are some of Absolutely!‘s dated theatrical games and artifices. Pirandello’s play, which he described himself as “a parable more than a comedy”, comprises a series of “coups de scéne each of which destroys a hitherto accepted truth”, according to Christopher Robinson’s programme note. An Italian social comedy about a group of nosy people trying to get to the bottom of the truth about their mysterious neighbour’s living conditions and the wife and mother-in-law he keeps separate, it explores the differences between illusion and reality, truth and fiction, and seeks to demonstrate that the only certainty is that we can’t be certain of anything.

To which the only response I can offer up is “Gee, wow!” But on yet another hand, Absolutely! comes with the kind of rich theatrical pedigree that can’t be dismissed quite so easily. It reunites the great octogenarian film and theatre director/designer Franco Zeffirelli with actress Joan Plowright (aka Lady Olivier, the widow of the late Lord Laurence), both of them making a rare return to the stage where they famously worked together in the 1970s on such Italian comedies as Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Filumena.

Around the presence of Plowright (playing the role of the mother-in-law with regal authority) has been assembled a tremendous roll-call of excellent character actors, including Oliver Ford Davies, Brid Brennan, Anna Carteret, Gawn Grainger and Jeffry Wickham. But the stand-out performances come from Darrell D’Silva as the tortured husband, torn between the mother-in-law and the wife that may or may not be her daughter, and the excellent Liza Tarbuck, making her West End debut as the busybody wife in whose home the action unfolds.

Against a beautiful mosaic walled set, everyone works furiously to bring it to life. But though there are lots of mirrors, there’s no smoke to this play about theatrical smoke and mirrors.

– Mark Shenton