HEADLONG

Suddenly a great classic that doesn't now work well in its original form comes alive again in this superb new complex, multi-layered remake.

Pirandello's masterpiece, based in his subversion of now century-old theatrical conventions, asked questions about reality and its representation that were shocking and controversial at the time. In 1921 he wrote a play about a theatre company, rehearsing one of his own plays, who are interrupted by a group of mysterious Characters who have no Author to tell their melodramatic, perhaps mythic, story.

Rupert Goold and Ben Power's new version puts back into this work, for a 21st-century audience, its original challenge to an audience's complacent understanding of what is real. It does this by replacing the theatre company with a documentary film company trying to do a story - about a dying boy who chooses euthanasia - which they have to tell using the acted reconstructions that we are so familiar with now. Which is more authentic: the awkward testimony of the people whose story it is, or the more dramatically powerful reconstructions?

When the six Characters enter - into the bland office of the filmmakers - they seem impossibly histrionic. But their passions soon overwhelm the tepid concerns of the "real" people whom they are asking to tell their story. They are led by Ian McDiarmid as the Father, who as a TV and (Star Wars) film star carries some fictional baggage for us, and Denise Gough, as the Stepdaughter, whose splendidly vampish performance style initially suggests something altogether unreal. But the power of their story of illicit sex and the death of children soon drives from our minds the actual (and therefore more real?) story of the poor euthanased boy.

The staging and the projected video are at first simple and straightforward. There is the world of the stage and the world of the filmed documentary - but as the video starts recording the passions of the Characters, and as they start trying to interfere with the process, the levels of reality begin to blur in a fascinating way.

By the beginning of the second half, after a wonderfully operatic conclusion to the first (which seems to suggest that to tell the truth, only art will do), the reality has become startlingly theatrical and extraordinarily powerful, with the supposedly real-world filmmaker (Catherine McCormack) suddenly caught up in it. As the impossibility of ever resolving the multiple situations becomes clear a wild series of different endings - some of them silly, some of them moving - starts tumbling out.

There is a final ending, of course, because an audience, however much excited, has to go home eventually. This is an absorbing exploration of Pirandello's original philosophical question: how, when you play it back in your mind, do you know your life is real?

What is reality?

Is it possible that the tale of six fictional characters could be more real than a documentary? This premise is explored in Six Characters in Search of an Author, an adaptation of Italian playwright, Luigi Pirandello’s original 1921 play by Rupert Goold and Ben Power of British theatre company Headlong. Said premise might seem like an attempt to explore a concept on an intellectual level rather than engage the audience emotionally. Rest assured that this is definitely not the case.

A documentary film crew, lead by a Producer (Catherine McCormack), is making a doco-drama about a terminally ill teenage boy who chooses his own “end” through voluntary euthanasia. The thing is it just ain’t gut wrenching enough. Heaven forbid, it seems the story needs to be manipulated. They need more personal testimonies and re-enactments. Enter six unknown characters (they at least knock first) five in black and one little girl in white. They beg the Producer to tell their story which they promise is far more compelling.

The story of the six characters begins with Father (Ian McDiarmid) visiting Stepdaughter (Denise Gough) in a dirty room for her sexual services. Trying to describe the rest of the play would be as futile as trying to describe a David Lynch film. The story unravels like the layers of an onion before the onion finally eats itself. We experience genuine fear and grief and a few priceless self-referential, one liners.

The program notes say that the Pirandello’s idea of an “Author” was probably closer to that of a director. At the time Italian theatre was driven by actors and run by managers. There was no such thing as a director. Knowing the intended meaning of “Author” adds yet another layer to the story. Are these six characters in search of a director who can walk them through their story or are they looking for an author or playwright to create a story with them in it?

Ian McDiarmid deserves special mention as the mysteriously chilling father. You probably know him as The Emperor in Star Wars. His diction is perfectly clear and his performance is utterly compelling as he moves from the funny to the disturbing.

The set design and visuals are startling and surreal, thanks in to the work of Designer Miriam Buether and Video and Projection Designer Lorna Heavey. Video footage from the documentary of the dying teenager is integrated superbly. After the interval, the characters are set against a background of television static while the stage is bare except for an extra-large fish tank that gives off a most eerie blue-green light. Composer and Sound Designer, Adam Cork, has made a score that creeps up on you, suddenly immersing the theatre in loud swirling sound when the play is at its most dramatic.

At its best The Sydney Festival should amaze Australian audiences with work they wouldn’t see otherwise. This play with a script full of twists and a stage production that is extremely innovative and flawlessly executed is such a work. Stop reading this review and get your tickets now!

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.