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Playing games

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Six Characters in Search of an Author
Gielgud

Riflemind
Trafalgar Studios

As for the direction, I worry that Rupert Goold is getting carried away with his hard-won and richly deserved success. He so clearly wants to direct films that he’s becoming a nuisance in the theatre. Every aspect of the staging bears the mark of the auteur’s hand. Optically, aurally, sartorially, architecturally, the show is so strenuously detailed that the result is a frenetic and panting emptiness. The lights quiver and flicker like epileptic glow-worms, the sound-track bangs and trills and crumps, the music barges in and interrupts whenever it feels like it, the back walls ooze with superimposed video peppledash, a trinity of overhead screens pump out further visual anti-matter and the set is a neo-reconstruction of de-contextualised spatial layering, i.e., a set within a set within a set within a set.

The costumes are a mixture of tat from Primark and street-clown subfusc and the acting, oh God, the acting —- as one of the characters might yelp — it somehow has to compete with the gaudy circus in which it finds itself stranded. The result is a mishmash of loud, repetitive and mannered performances. To be fair, for a couple of minutes, the play becomes as clever as it wants to be. Actors appear playing Goold and Power as they pitch the production to the show’s backer, who preens like a peacock and ponders aloud which star might play him. This is funny but, like everything else, it soon runs out of comic puff. And because these self-referential puppets have no proper narrative journey to complete they’re suddenly and violently bumped off. The same flimsy ending awaits the documentary-maker who descends, motivelessly, into an existential crisis.