Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✭✭✭
by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Domenico Pietropaolo, directed by Tadeusz Bradecki
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 19-September 23, 2000
“Bravissimi tutti!”
The Shaw Festival was very surprised to find that its production of "Six Characters in Search of an Author" had sold out its entire run, including previews, two months before it even opened. One of the various explanations for this remarkable fact is that Pirandello's masterpiece, though one of the central works of 20th-century drama, is seldom performed in North America. Besides this, Christopher Newton has cultivated an audience at the Court House Theatre for precisely those "difficult" or unusual plays that are part of the Shaw Festival mandate. When we add in the fame the Shaw troupe has garnered for its ensemble acting and the knack Polish director, Tadeusz Bradecki, has shown in past seasons for bringing complex plays to life in brilliant productions, we have gone some way to understand how this happened.
"Six Characters" is famous as the most thorough dramatic critique of naturalism on stage and of realism in general. The paradoxical relation of illusion and reality, game playing, the nature of personality, the ultimate unknowability of the self-these are among the numerous topics in the play that have become central tenets of modern drama. Like Shaw's works, this is a play of ideas with art, rather than politics or society, as the subject of debate Pirandello portrays the confrontation between fiction and reality in the guise of a confrontation between a modern theatre company in the midst of rehearsals with six characters, brought to life by an author's imagination but who have been left in an existential limbo when he abandoned the work they were part of. They seek from the Director to have their tragic story finally embodied and completed so they find rest, but the process of trying to show their story on stage only leads them to see how unbridgeable their two realities are. For the Characters, theirs is the sole and unchanging reality. For the Actors, any attempt to portray the story can only be an interpretation consistent with what the stage allows. The issues Pirandello raised in 1921 are still alive, unresolved and perhaps unresolvable.
In the wrong hands "Six Characters" can seem like a tedious philosophical debate. Pirandello makes it very difficult for us to become involved in the suffering and anger of the Characters since their story is constantly being interrupted and analyzed. Bradecki has overcome these difficulties in a wide variety of ways. First, he and designer Peter Hartwell have had the brilliant idea of setting the action here and now and making it specific to the Shaw Festival. In an improvised prelude actors in their typical ragtag outfits mention bits of the latest Canadian news during the general pre-rehearsal hubbub. The six Characters, however, when they make their dramatic appearance, are clad in the black Edwardian costumes one so often sees in Shaw productions. Bradecki and Hartwell have thus added a further metatheatrical layer to the play by having the central confrontation also represent the confrontation of the contemporary Shaw troupe with its typical period material.
Much of the fun comes from seeing the Shaw actors imitating their own rehearsal process. Next, Bradecki has given each of the actors, no matter how small the part, a very specific personality, thus adding a richness and sense of detail to combat the abstractness of the argument. He also has made the Characters confront all forms of modern theatre. Therefore, he interpolates Imali Perera's beautiful singing, Alistair James Harlond's dazzling tap-dancing, recorded excerpts from opera and a big production number including the Stepdaughter of a song from the 1916 musical "Chu Chin Chow". He finds a humour in the play few have emphasized, making the central encounter also one between the comedy of the Actors and the tragedy of the Characters. Bradecki is also fortunate to be using a brand new translation by Domenico Pietropaolo which does away with the archaisms of older versions.
Despite Pirandello's and Bradecki's frequent use of humour to undercut the Characters' story, he allows the two main causes for their suffering full dramatic impact. The Father's unwitting seduction of his own Stepdaughter is truly shocking and the daughter Rosetta's drowning and Boy's suicide truly frightening. In these we see the hell in which the Characters exist and also difficulty of the Actors in fully comprehending it.
The six Characters are not all equally detailed as is the case in any fiction. Most fully realized is the Stepdaughter played by Kelli Fox, who fully encompasses the enormous range this role demands, from humour to humiliation, from rage to tenderness. Norman Browning, who is such a natural in comedy, might not be thought the ideal actor to portray the guilt-obsessed Father, but through rigorous control of voice and diction he brings it off and brings clarity to the Father's many quotable speeches about the relation of art and reality. Sharry Flett's voice and bearing bring a dignity of the role of the Mother who often can seem merely pathetic. Joel Hechter has the demeanour to play the disdainful Son, but not quite the needed vocal control. The other two Characters, the Boy and the Rosetta, have no lines. There is, of course, the seventh Character, who makes a sudden spectacular appearance in Act 2. An almost unrecognizable Mary Haney makes a strong impression in this small role as Madame Pace, the depraved brothel-keeper.
Among the theatre company, Barry MacGregor is perfectly cast as the Director. He makes sense of the Director's frequent modulation between interest and exasperation regarding the Characters and bullying and cajoling his Actors. Brigitte Robinson is very funny as the temperamental Leading Lady, while Ben Carlson keeps his Leading Man well out of the realm of caricature. The rest of the cast, often relegated to the role of a kind of audience on stage, deserves praise for never letting their focus falter.
Part of the conceit of the play is that there is no set as such--the stage as it is is the set. We can even see the backs of sets for other Court House plays at the back of the stage. The only concession is that the Director's table has necessarily been moved from the middle of the auditorium onto the stage. Robert Thomson has the chance to exercise his wit in distinguishing lighting as requested by the Director MacGregor versus lighting as requested by the director Bradecki. This is the most imaginative production of this difficult play I have seen, and I'm sure it will be a very long time before it is equaled much less surpassed.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Barry MacGregor and Kelli Fox (foreground). ©2000 David Cooper.
2000-09-26
Six Characters in Search of an Author