by Luigi Pirandello

Director - Drew Noble

Imagine we’re rehearsing a play at Rhyl Little Theatre… and suddenly six people walk in from the back of the auditorium claiming they’re characters whose author abandoned them, and demanding that we stage their story.

That’s the starting point of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The play begins in a rehearsal room. An acting company are preparing a show when these six strange figures arrive and interrupt everything. They insist they aren’t actors at all, they’re unfinished characters, trapped in a moment of family tragedy that was never properly written.

What they want is simple: they want the company to stage their story so it can finally exist.

From there the play becomes this fascinating collision between actors and characters. The director tries to stage the events, the actors attempt to perform them… but the characters keep interrupting, insisting that what they experienced is real and can’t simply be acted.

So you end up watching two versions of the same story unfolding, the characters reliving it, and the actors trying to reproduce it, and slowly the boundary between rehearsal and reality begins to blur.

The reason I think this would work particularly well for us at Rhyl Little Theatre is that the setting is essentially a rehearsal space. The theatre itself becomes the environment of the play. We don’t need elaborate scenery the focus is on actors, storytelling, and theatrical imagination.

If anyone saw the recent staging of Our Town with Michael Sheen, there’s a similar feeling of the actors and the audience sharing the same space, and the story unfolding right in front of you rather than behind a large set.

What makes the play especially exciting from a company perspective is the acting opportunities. The Father, the Step-Daughter and the Ditector are fantastic central roles, and the ensemble get to work on two levels : playing actors rehearsing a production, and then interacting with the characters whose story they’re trying to tell.

And at its heart it isn’t really an intellectual play at all. It’s a very human story about a fractured family, guilt, resentment and people desperately trying to have their story heard.

When the play premiered in 1921 audiences famously didn’t know what to make of it because they had never seen theatre like it before. Today it’s recognised as one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century.

What I think it offers us is the chance to stage something that is genuinely theatrical, actor-driven, and a little bit unexpected. The kind of show where the audience aren’t quite sure what’s going to happen next.

And I think seeing that happen, at Rhyl Little Theatre, with this company, could be something really special.

1. Will audiences understand it? Yes — because what the audience are really watching is a rehearsal that goes wrong. That’s something everyone immediately understands. The emotional story underneath is actually very clear: it’s a family tragedy that the characters are desperate to have told.

2. Will it need a complicated set? Actually the opposite. The play is set in a rehearsal room, so the staging can be very simple. The theatre itself becomes the setting, which means we can focus on lighting, atmosphere and performance rather than large pieces of scenery.

3. What period is it set? Although written in 1921, the play is not set specifically on that period and so can, to a degree, be modernised in a timeless quality to give more scope to costume.

4. Do we have enough people for the cast? Yes. It works very well for an ensemble. You have the six characters themselves, the actors rehearsing the play, and the stage staff within the rehearsal. So it offers a lot of opportunities for members of the company to be involved.

5. Why this play for our company? Because it’s a play about theatre itself. For a company like ours it celebrates the process of making theatre, while also giving actors some really rich roles to work with.