Can Pirandello's ground-breaking 1921 comi-tragedy ever be made to work in performance? Featuring six characters, conceived but abandoned by a playwright, who invade a theatre demanding that their story is told, it's a brilliant idea on paper but often falls flat in performance. Rupert Goold and Ben Power's creative mugging comes close to turning the metaphysics into fizzing meta-theatre; but despite Goold's signature razzle-dazzle, the evening is more impressive than enjoyable.
Here, rather than a theatre, the characters come to a TV editing suite, in which a drama-documentary about assisted suicide is in post-production. A deeply damaged family riven by sexual aberration and guilt, they persuade the Producer to turn her camera on them, so drawing her and us into a world where the lines between truth and fiction are increasingly blurry. By the end, the Producer appears to have become a figment of her own imagination, tormented in Blair Witch style by people who are only fictions. As a comment on the slippery world of reality TV and drama-doc reconstructions, it's fiendishly clever – but boy, does it know it.
If you want ideas and astonishing stagecraft, you couldn't ask for more. Things start slowly, even a little clumsily, and the first half lacks a comic edge. But from the pre-interval moment when the family suddenly announce their wild grief through operatic aria, the production finds its voice and offers one lush image after another. The trouble is that it's so layered it smothers all emotion: you watch a child drowning in a giant fish tank and think to yourself, "Wow, that's clever, how do they do that?", rather than feel anything for the child and her family. Undoubtedly strong, but possibly quite wrong, too.
