ALSO PLAYING

FEW plays have caused as much discussion and argument as Luigi Pirandello’s rarely seen Six Characters in Search of an Author, written in 1921 and often considered the beginning of the theatre of the absurd. Littleshoes Productions are presenting it for just three days this week, June 1, 2 and 3, in Cork’s Unitarian Church on Princes Street. Productions of the play naturally vary a lot because it lends itself to many interpretations, and this latest take will be a modern version by Sinéad Dunphy. But the basic idea remains the same. Are the characters in a play more real than the performers? Real people die and are forgotten unless they survive in memory or in history. But great fictional characters never die: they go on being reimagined and reshaped eternally. Shakespeare is dead, but Hamlet pops up regularly in vastly different interpretations.

Six Characters presents a group of actors about to present a play, arguing that it’s a lot of nonsense. Part of the joke is that they’re talking about one of Pirandello’s own plays. Then six characters arrive – not living people but creations of an author who abandoned them without finishing the work, and their frustration at being abandoned won’t let them rest. They don’t have a script. ‘We are the drama,’ they say, and they insist on being allowed to act out their lives on the stage to complete themselves. The absurdity of the idea presents great possibilities for comedy as well as an opportunity to reflect on the role of the dramatist in revealing the hidden life of people; there’s a contrast between what’s in the writer’s mind and what can actually be presented on stage. And, of course, human beings have different realities depending on their situation at any time of the day – at home, at work, at play. Littleshoes deserve credit for reviving the play, even for a few days.