Six Characters In Search Of An Author @ C

Six Characters In Search Of An Author was penned by Luigi Pirandello in 1921, and the performance starts with exactly what the title tells you: six nameless, author-less characters appearing during the tech rehearsal of a play that isn't theirs, desperate to bring their story to the stage.

The original text has of course been modernised and made Fringe-specific with its jokes and references to Edinburgh's confusing geography and in that sense it is convincing enough. After all anything can happen during the Fringe – why not change a show at the last minute to tell the story of six suddenly appeared characters who look the part and have enough melodrama to grip an audience? It seems totally feasible.

Unfortunately, that's not how it plays out. The whole production is entirely too confused to allow its audience to make enough sense of what is going on in order to accept the absurdity before them. Everybody seems to be running all over the place and it's hard to concentrate on the parts of the story you know you should be focusing on when you're not entirely sure if the story is important at all. Yes, the idea of a play within a play, a play in which you watch the creation of not one but two plays, is a great idea but it needs clear guidelines and boundaries to work. These do not seem to exist here. While the performances individually are often fine examples of how an emotional tragedy should be constructed on stage, they are not enough. The 'characters' do not work well enough with the original actors and crew to mesh the two worlds together the way that the closing speech – delivered by a charming techie who until this point has been the most grounded character and bringer of light relief to the play – needs them to have meshed.

It is telling that the audience do not really know what to do when the house lights come up or when to start leaving. They are just too confused to grasp the unconventional end of the performance which, if the rest had worked, would have been disconcerting in all the right ways and earned fantastic applause. Not, unfortunately, for this performance.