Six Characters in Search of an Author

Review:  Words such as "adaptation," "re-imagining," or even "hijacking" are insufficient to convey what the UK's Headlong Theatre have done to Six Characters in Search of an Author. Rupert Goold and Ben Power have adapted Luigi Pirandello's 1921 classic the way that Wile E Coyote adapted the products of the Acme Corporation: it becomes episodic, frenetic, willfully over-elaborate, but very entertaining to watch. Whether Goold deserves the title of Super Genius rests on one's taste for genre bending as a literary sport, but he has produced here so many tremendous moments of theatre that you have to love his direction, from the comedy where this fine ensemble have to act a previous scene being fast-forwarded replay at 10x speed, to the tragic Pre-Raphaelite beauty of an Ophelia-like drowning in a fish tank.

In the original play, a family of six characters bursts in on a rehearsal of a play (also by Pirandello) demanding to have their story told by the actors there. Goold transposes the rehearsal room to a TV studio making a drama documentary about euthanasia. Most of the meat of Pirandello's sandwich is kept intact, but the ending is like a (fun) rollercoaster ride through a maze of distorting mirrors – what the French and the theorists call mise en abyme. The turns in the abyss are not merely "it was all a dream" but stuff like: it was actually just a director's commentary on a DVD extra about a scriptwriter like Robert Altman's The Player pitching an idea for a scene where Pirandello can't figure out an ending for the characters who slip out of their roles into a rehearsal for a docudrama where the director is seen going backstage on video carrying the dead body of a fictional... And on and on it goes, for so long that we wonder if the play shouldn't have been renamed Six Characters in Search of an Ending. But even if the destination seems to be receding like a rainbow, the journey is the reward. As the narrative gains momentum and implodes into a self-parody, it doesn't matter if we lose track of what's being made fun of: we feel sure it's all frightfully clever and that there's a Designated Author who has all the loose ends tied up somewhere back at the office.

Incredibly, Pirandello's main point – that we are each of us as characters to other people, and we are judged imperfectly – is not lost, and it is made in new and interesting ways. The actors rise to the Olympic demands of so many levels of framing (imagine having to think to yourself: "so I'm a character showing another actor who'll play me in a documentary exactly how I reacted when I recognised my stepdaughter in the brothel".) Ian McDiarmid, best known as the Emperor in Star Wars, gives a bravura display ranging from self-conscious embarrassment to the suavely stylised generic Guilty Father. Who is this guy? We don't know, and that's the point, made with the acting, and driven home by a line from the television actor required to play him: "If I copy him exactly, it's not going to be credible."

Similarly, when Catherine McCormack appears doing the job of the Producer she bears a shade of cardboard cutout, but she seems paradoxically more real and very human when she is projected on the big screen reciting Hamlet's words "is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his conceit..." The gaps between depiction and reality are here both the message and the medium.

If the Sydney Festival is trying to establish global leadership in the category of Most Outrageous Treatment of a Classic Play, it has certainly done well with this work, the STC's Optimism, and the Schaubühne's all-grunting, all-farting Hamlet. But Festival audiences are willing to overlook kneejerk accusations of self-indulgence and bad taste precisely because these productions are so very well done. Jason Catlett

Preview: "I'm known as the man who corrupted Darth Vader," Ian McDiarmid says, "But that's all right. I'm fine with it, and if it encourages people to see plays, then that's great."

The Scottish-born actor, 65, will always be remembered as the slimy, malevolent galactic Emperor Palpatine in four of the six Star Wars movies (OK, purists, five including the remastered 1997 version of The Empire Strikes Back into which he was digitally inserted). He was cast as the withered tyrant in 1983's Return of the Jedi despite being just 37 at the time; he had been spotted by George Lucas in a Sam Shepard play portraying an elderly character in heavy makeup. "I was astonished to get the call in the first place really. I did the film and I don't think [Lucas] was thinking about prequels at the time, but fortunately, when he did, 16 years later, I was the right age to play the revered Chancellor before he turned into the monster."

McDiarmid's performances almost make those three unnecessary Star Wars prequels watchable. No on-screen creature, human or computer generated, seems half so animated as his leering, hooded arch-fiend when, in a sepulchral croak, he orders the massacre of Jedi children. "Of course, I'm not so scary in real life," he laughs.

From three movies in search of a script to Six Characters in Search of an Author. McDiarmid heads the cast of a new version of Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play in this month's Sydney Festival. The original Six Characters did for theatre what Picasso and Braque did for still life painting: fracturing, recontextualising, looking from several angles at once. The curtain opens on a theatre company in rehearsal who are interrupted by the arrival of a family of six, claiming to be fictional creations whose author has given up on them. They demand that their story - a seedy tale involving incest and suicide - be performed by the company in order that their existence be validated.

This version, directed and co-adapted by white-hot young UK director Rupert Goold, takes place in a television studio. "The team is constructing a documentary about assisted suicide," explains McDiarmid, who plays the role of the "reprehensible" Father. "The producer [Catherine McCormack] is in a dilemma because they're not getting the balance right between factual television and the dramatised bits done with actors. The six characters persuade the producer to film their story. She then finds it has gone further than she imagined. It's an evening of theatrical surprises."
 
He confesses that the play never interested him before as it seemed dated. "When it was written it was revolutionary - there were riots in the theatre. Rupert really wanted to give the audience the kind of experience they might have had all those years ago. So that's how we rehearsed it. I think to do a traditional version is to do a disservice to the play."

Many top UK critics agreed. "Goold often pushes the envelope outrageously," wrote Charles Spencer in the London Telegraph. "Indeed, he has invented a whole new last act, packed with Pirandellian twists... the whole hi-tech show has a rare zing and confidence."

The production was staged for the Chichester Festival and enjoyed a successful West End run (despite a health scare that forced McDiarmid to miss a number of performances). "We're all very pleased to be able to do it again," he says. A return visit to Sydney was another inducement. "Two Star Wars prequels were filmed there and I've got friends there and it will be very nice to see them again. And of course, we all love the sun."

A former co-artistic director of London's Almeida Theatre, garlanded with both Olivier and Tony Awards, McDiarmid admits that stage-door attention from Star Wars fans can get a bit "heavy handed". Are little kids scared of him? "I hope not. But you know what kids are like. They enjoy a glimpse at the dark side."

The same could be said of McDiarmid, who grew up watching live ‘variety shows' in Dundee. "From an early age I was always more interested in the villains than the good guys. I'm sure a psychologist could see a few things in my career trajectory as a result of that." Nick Dent