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SIFA 2015: Character building in Pirandello’s classic

SINGAPORE — Is truth really stranger than fiction? Perhaps, but certainly not in the case of Luigi Pirandello’s classic play Six Characters In Search Of An Author.

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SINGAPORE — Is truth really stranger than fiction? Perhaps, but certainly not in the case of Luigi Pirandello’s classic play Six Characters In Search Of An Author.

Presented by France’s Theatre de la Ville at the Singapore International Festival Of Arts, the Italian playwright’s 1921 absurdist, meta-theatrical piece is exactly that: A theatre company in the middle of rehearsals gets a visit from an unusual family — an eerie sort of all-black Addams Family vibe — claiming to be characters who are, well, in search of an author for their story to be fully realised, after their creator bailed out on them.

So we get this face-off between these figments-of-imagination-already-come-to-life and the actors and crew whose roles are to realise them. The play’s liberal dose of philosophical musings on theatre-making are mixed into what is, under conventional non-meta-theatrical circumstances, a perfectly absorbing tragic drama of telenovela proportions where the dysfunctional family deal with a mysterious death, an incestuous Electra complex moment between a prostitute-daughter and estranged father, among others at different points.

Like Bertolt Brecht’s plays, Pirandello’s emerged at a time when European theatre was rebelling against realist conventions. Six Characters could be seen as the Italian playwright’s manifesto of sorts, for here is a play that highlights the magic of theatre — heightened by the crisp and tight direction of Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota that gives it a steady rhythm — while constantly repudiating and undermining itself, a self-reflexive play in the throes of existentialism.

It was certainly groundbreaking for its time and it’s still rather interesting to see the theatrical world and experience dissected and deconstructed onstage, how one person’s (or character’s reality) is another theatre maker’s font of inspiration, a textual jumping off point (as when the characters take turns with actors re-enacting scenes from their lives). It is also thanks to works like Six Characters that these very ideas have become a norm. You find that traces of that same self-reflexivity that gave birth to art from Pirandello’s time are regularly manifested everywhere today, from the stripping of pretense in forum theatre to characters leaping out from comic book pages and movie screens (in comic books and movies) to stories folding into themselves to, even, reality television. At the same time, one can also consider the division between what’s the “real” and the illusory as more or less a hang-up of Western theatre compared with, say, traditional Asian theatrical forms, where ritual and performance blend seamlessly. MAYO MARTIN

For more information on the festival, visit https://sifa.sg/sifa/

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