Playing games

Six Characters in Search of an Author
Gielgud

Riflemind
Trafalgar Studios

Pirandello, the master of pretentious bombast, is perhaps the most talent-free of all Nobel laureates. Here he is in the West End with one of his better-known experiments updated by Rupert Goold and his collaborator Ben Power. Playing games with the conventions of theatre was Pirandello’s main gift to the trade and his supporters will tell you this play ‘analyses the relationship between fiction and reality’. But there’s nothing as rigorous or coherent as an analysis here.

We start in the editing suite of a young female documentary-maker whose latest project has stalled. Enter a family of over-dressed show-offs who announce that they are characters abandoned by their author. Rather improbably, the film-maker agrees to chuck her dying documentary and follow their story instead. Certainly there’s something brilliant in this idea. If fictional characters declare that they are more real and enduring than the real and enduring world which it is their function to imitate then all kinds of philosophical and comic fun should follow. But Pirandello is no philosopher, still less a comedian. Once he’s delivered his devilish opening surprise his play pops like a party balloon and all that’s left is a desiccated jellyfish of histrionic absurdities.

Here are two of the scenes that follow. a) A teenage blonde in a bowler hat circles the stage on roller-skates blowing bubbles into the air while an elderly aesthete swinging a cane praises the glories of ‘the imaginaaaaysheeon’. b) A hysterical mother discovers her estranged husband raping her under-age daughter in a hotel room and responds by singing an operatic aria to which her paedophile hubbie and daughter-victim add harmonies. And so it goes on for 150 minutes, a sort of mirthless pantomime aimed at an audience of post-structuralists scribbling away at dissertations no one will read.