REVEIW: Six Characters in Search of an Author - Ad Astra Theatre

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Ad Astra Theatre Company

Playwright: Luigi Pirandello

Director: Heidi Gledhill

Assistant Director: Colin W. Smith

Dramaturg: Desley Martin

Costume Design: Helena Trupp

Makeup: Cherie McCaffery

Sound Design & Composer: Tommi Civilli

Lighting Design: Noah Milne

Choreographer: Cherie McCaffery

Composer: Lucinda Shaw

“See us live out our drama.”

That line sums up the strange, unsettling bargain Luigi Pirandello asks of his audience. Six abandoned 'Characters' appear at a theatre with an unfinished story, insisting it be told. They do not ask politely. They interrupt a rehearsal, unsettle the room, and drag everyone around them into their family drama.

Written way back in 1921, Six Characters in Search of an Author is considered one of the great meta-theatrical works. It is philosophical, existential, intentionally unstable, and extremely wordy. This is not a play that holds your hand and guides you. In fact, it seems to snatch your hand away, stare into the distance, and then launch into another monologue about the nature of truth...

The production begins with the stage arranged as a deliberately practical rehearsal area. A white curtain hangs at the back, with a ladder, upright piano, some furniture, and crew members bustling. Before the show even officially begins, we get a peek into the backstage shenanigans with the cast shaking their collective thang to No Scrubs, which makes the later arrival of the grief-stricken Characters seem even more surreal.

Dressed in vintage black clothing, with ghostly makeup and a sombre stillness, they look as though they have wandered in from a family crypt in another century. The Director, played by Jonty Hansen, reacts with the exact kind of “what on earth is happening here?” energy I imagine most directors would have if six randoms waltzed into a closed rehearsal and demanded stage time. Hansen brings a wonderfully sassy impatience to the role, giving the Director both comic bite and mounting frustration. That practical exasperation gives the audience something to hold onto. As the Director tries to make sense of the Characters’ demands, Hansen becomes a necessary anchor, balancing disbelief, ego, curiosity, and irritation. His line, “This is all just talk,” landed particularly well, partly because by that point, yes, it very much was.

As the Father, Gregory J Wilken has the densest and most verbose material in the play. His character spends much of the show explaining, defending, and reframing himself, as though he might be able to talk his way into redemption if given enough time. Wilken gives weight to that moral discomfort. There is always something uneasy sitting underneath the performance, leaving us unsure whether we are watching a guilty man, a grieving man, or someone who simply needs his version of events to be believed. His performance is impressive, even when the language itself becomes hard to follow.

Davis Dingle as the Son brings restraint and tension to a role that could easily disappear beside the louder grief and outrage around him. His presence is notable because he resists the family drama rather than feeding it. That resistance gives the production some of its strongest dramatic friction. Alongside Hansen and Wilken, Dingle helps form a compelling trio of male performances, each representing a different kind of control slowly slipping away.

In the role of the Step-Daughter, Emma Kidd brings a burst of volume, vibrancy, and complete chaos to the stage. She refuses to sit neatly within the story, constantly thrusting herself into the spotlight, disrupting, provoking, and demanding that her version of events be heard. Kidd captures the Step-Daughter’s fierce insistence that her truth will not be softened, rewritten, or filtered. This unpredictability sharply contrasts the more subdued nature of the other Characters. There is anger in her performance, but also pain, humour, and a need to take back control of a story that has clearly been told around her, rather than by her.

Anna Loren gives the Mother a mournful, haunted quality, existing largely in grief and shame. The two silent children, played by Auden Ryan / Hank Steele and Ammi Johnson / Tia Godbold, add to the uneasy atmosphere simply by being there. Their silence makes them feel more like symbols than children, which suits the strange purgatorial quality of the piece. And then there is Lucinda Shaw as Madame Pace, who arrives like a gypsy diva from another planet. Her costume is fabulous, her presence is deliciously heightened, and her appearance injects a jolt of colour and theatrical excess into the otherwise shadowy world of the Characters.

The wider acting troupe, including Jules Berry, Nathan Turner, Frankie Kershaw, Yianni Sines, Carmen O’Connell, Stella Peterson, Alex Flew, Cherie McCaffery, Brock O’Rourke, Grace Swadling, and Liam Olsen, create the necessary contrast between theatrical artifice and lived drama. Their disbelief, ridicule, and gradual absorption into the story help frame the central conflict of the play. The actors within the play watch, judge, imitate, and attempt to reproduce what the Characters insist can never truly be reproduced.

I know this is the whole point of the show, but truly, what an actor’s worst nightmare! Imagine trying to rehearse while the character you are playing suddenly comes alive, walks into the room, and starts critiquing your interpretation. Actors already have directors, dramaturgs, reviewers, and their own inner critic to contend with. Director Heidi Gledhill embraces this absurdist side of the work. She places the audience right in the middle of this family squabble that is part rehearsal, part ghost story, and part existential fever dream. The use of silhouette behind the white curtain is one of the production’s stronger visual choices, giving the Characters an otherworldly quality during their attempts to be made real.

Technically, the production is intentionally bare. The lighting design by Noah Milne offers some colour work during the staged “scenes”, but for much of the production, the stage remains plainly lit. I can see the logic in preserving the rehearsal-room reality. But for a play so concerned with blurred realities, I did find myself wanting more visual shaping as the world of the Characters began to intrude. Tommi Civilli’s sound design supports the production’s eerie atmosphere well. The sombre underscoring on the piano adds to the atmosphere, with morbid music often accompanying the Characters as they dramatically contemplate their existence. Still, the production’s greatest challenge remains the script itself. Pirandello’s language, translated from Italian, is dense, cerebral, and often repetitive by modern standards. The play somehow manages to feel both fast and slow: fast in the amount of information being thrown at us, and slow in the time it takes to comprehend it.

For me, this was a production full of skilled actors in a play I admired more than I enjoyed. That distinction is important. I can definitely appreciate the craft, the performances, the ideas, and the ambition, while also recognising that the script sat outside my personal theatrical taste. The Characters argue that their truth is urgent and undeniable, but I did not always feel absorbed by that truth. At times, the Actors on stage seemed far more drawn into the story than I was as an audience member. I could understand the stakes on an intellectual level, but emotionally, the play often left me feeling a bit detached and distanced.

Still, this is a worthy and challenging undertaking by Ad Astra. Six Characters in Search of an Author is not light entertainment, nor is it trying to be. It is a strange, self-aware puzzle about performance, memory, authorship, and the human need to be seen. It asks big questions about whether fiction can be more permanent than reality, whether actors can ever fully embody another person’s pain, and whether being witnessed is the closest thing to resolution some stories ever receive.

This production is best suited to drama lovers, passionate playwrights, frustrated directors, theatre theorists, and anyone who enjoys leaving a show with more questions than answers. It may not be for audiences seeking emotional ease or narrative simplicity, but for those who enjoy philosophical theatre with an absurdist edge, there is plenty here to chew on.

It went over my head in places. But it was performed with conviction, staged with clear respect for the material, and led by a cast who understood the strange machinery of these Characters: trapped in the theatre, trapped in their story, and desperate for someone to listen.