Extending the long tail of works influenced by Luigi Pirandello’s box of theatrical tricks, Six Characters in Search of An Author, Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror features an author and performers hoping they won’t be searched for. Denied a permit by the minister of culture in an unnamed dictatorship, they have licensed a venue for a wedding, at which Almeida ticket-holders are guests in the flower-bowered auditorium. Following an ominous siren or knock on the door, the actors must quick-change to become nuptial participants while we are ordered to behave like a congregation.
Initially, each main actor has two identities. The registrar becomes, in the play within the wedding, state censor Čelik, both men for some reason black-gloved. The marrying couple jump in and out of bridal dress and groom suit to portray Mei, a junior at the culture ministry, and Adem, a young writer whose script is under scrutiny. The fake best man plays Bax, a pampered state-approved dramatist. But the Pirandellian pleasure comes from our awareness that there must be a third person underneath each doubling. A tiny moment when someone is revealed to have the same name on and off stage hints at what may be happening.
Samizdat theatrics are the basis of two notable one-act dramas – Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979), featuring a version of Shakespeare’s regime-change play that toured dissident living rooms in communist Czechoslovakia, and a play by the Japanese dramatist Kōki Mitani, anglicised by Richard Harris as The Last Laugh (2007), about a state censor with a secret love of theatre, which may also be a weakness of Čelik.
Full length (two hours) gives Holcroft space to explore not only censorship, but auto-fiction, appropriation and propaganda. Her National Theatre success, Rules for Living (2015), about a catastrophic family gathering, made expert use of the frame-breaking ambushes, but A Mirror has the levels of a multi-storey car park with a locked-off basement. At one moment, by my maths, we are watching a play within a play within a play within a fake wedding.
A Mirror adds to a run of shows that play tricks on the audience, including Lucy Kirkwood’s Rapture and Danny Robins’s 2:22 – A Ghost Story. Recent prominent politicians are the most likely explanation for this fascination with false narrative. My one regret is that A Mirror does not directly address the curiosity in Britain of a form of censorship, on grounds of sensitivity, that is not imposed by the state (indeed, opposed by it) but willingly carried out by many creatives.
A work that teases the audience with repeated false realities faces its greatest test when it must reveal the underlying truth, but, in a final scene where the gloves come off in more than one sense, Holcroft achieves a series of satisfying surprises. Jeremy Herrin’s typically meticulous production observes the crime fiction rules that, while a story can confuse or mislead, it should not wilfully withhold or falsify information.
Shaven-headed and with a startling stare, Jonny Lee Miller mesmerises as Čelik and his variations, while Tanya Reynolds’s Mei shows an extraordinary range from meek to commanding and delivers a single line from Macbeth in a manner that draws applause. Micheal Ward’s Adem and Geoffrey Streatfeild’s Bax offer visions of idealistic young and cynical old writers that have relevance in democracies as well as dictatorships.
• At the Almeida theatre, London, until 23 September
