The Stage

Six Characters In Search of an Author

Published Tuesday 16 September 2008 at 19:05 by Gerald Berkowitz

Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s free adaptation, transferred from Chichester, inventively translates Pirandello’s speculations on the nature of fiction and reality into very contemporary terms, but ends up being a bit too clever for its own good.

In the original, a family group suddenly appear in a theatre, claiming to be characters from an unfinished play and demanding to have their story staged. Goold and Power replace the theatrical setting with a wholly new frame of a documentary film maker. This works particularly well in the first half as the family, while still insisting that they are fictional, function as real people watching their story inevitably falsified by the film process even as the documentary makers try their best to be transparent presenters of the truth.

In the second act, the adaptors add several further levels of distancing as the supposed reality of the documentary makers is exposed as part of a film about documentary making. Then that becomes part of a play about the making of the film, and then that becomes part of the very play we’re watching.

Meanwhile, the poor documentary maker from the opening scenes finds herself trapped in a limbo separate from all the other levels of reality and unable to break through to any of them.

Pirandello’s point gets made, but somewhere along the way the evening has become more about the cleverness of the adaptors than about the themes of the play, and least of all about the story the six characters wanted to have told in the first place.

Ian McDiarmid is unwaveringly magnetic as the head of the character family, whether coolly lecturing on the play’s paradoxes or writhing in the perpetual torment his story imposes on him, although Denise Gough has been directed to be a little too shrill as the stepdaughter who, in a further complication, insists that her version of the embedded story is more true than his. Noma Dumezweni begins strongly as the filmmaker but seems to lose her hold on the character even as the character is losing her hold on reality. Rupert Goold directs all the other actors to make their characters one-dimensional cliches.