Intriguing, infuriating, mesmerising and baffling

By Susie Weldon
Oct 7, 2009

Six characters in search of an author: From left, Olly Bell, Claire Louise Connolly, Hazel Holder, Jack Shepherd (centre), Jeremy Joyce, Gina Bramhill

Six Characters In Search of an Author
Bristol Old Vic
until Saturday, October 10

By Susie Weldon

Headlong Theatre’s version of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is the most extraordinary, intriguing and infuriating play to have mesmerised and baffled the Bristol Old Vic audience in a long time.

First performed in 1921 and now considered a classic of modernism, Pirandello’s play so shocked people with its radical, subversive ideas that fights broke out in the theatre and the Italian dramatist had to leave hastily by the stage door.

This acclaimed adaptation by Headlong’s artistic director Rupert Goold and associate director Ben Power transforms Pirandello’s play — a complex, multi-layered exploration of truth, illusion and reality — into a searing parable of today’s media and reality TV-obsessed age.

The plot begins simply enough: a team of film-makers is editing a documentary about a terminally ill boy in a Danish euthanasia clinic when six people walk in and declare themselves to be a family in search of an author to tell their unhappy story.

Amid much melodramatic grandstanding and conflict among themselves about the nature of that story, they persuade the Producer (played with passionate intensity by Catherine McCormack) to document their tale, telling her: “We each clutch to our own version but unless you help us, it can’t come out. None of it can happen without you.”

These prophetic words mark the start of a baffling, frequently bizarre and always compelling series of narratives, where shifting layers of time and plot add to the confusion and blur our ideas of what is real and true.

This is not an easy play; its ideas are challenging and the script is at times very disturbing. The Father turns out to have abused his Stepdaughter, who in turn had been forced into prostitution by her mother’s lecherous boss. The Mother is full of guilt and grief, and the two youngest children come to an unhappy end.

But it’s also very funny, utterly compelling and deeply thought provoking. This production is brilliantly staged with a superb cast. Jack Shepherd is excellent as the Father – at times anguished, at others entirely creepy – while Gina Bramhill is mesmerising as his bitter, coquettish Stepdaughter.