A dark concoction of magic and despair

WHEN this century of ours is remembered, it will be, among other things, for the way it has succeeded in making human suffering meaningless. People have been subjected to grotesque cruelty before but never in human history have so many people been killed and tormented in ways that deny them even the illusion of choice or significance. Trench warfare, death camps, gulags, aerial bombardments, no warning bombings have made notions of courage or sacrifice redundant.

It is not accidental that some of the oldest notions in theatre - suffering leading to wisdom, redemption in death - stopped working. And the point at which that happened is easily identifiable: the first performance in 1921 of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, now given a vibrant and often brilliant production by John Crowley at the Abbey.

Its eponymous characters have no choice about the sufferings they undergo and no possibility of learning anything from them. They have been invented and then abandoned by an author who can't complete their story. And Pirandello goes further: these invented characters are more "real" than real people. These figments of the imagination, for all that they are trapped in a dreadful story that they cannot change, have a permanence and coherence denied to flesh and blood humanity. It is a bleak view of things but one for which the times provide ample evidence.

Pirandello cheats, of course. The play is set, not in the real world but in a theatre, where a group of actors is rehearsing a play. He loads the dice by making these "real" actors less interesting than the six characters that invade their stage. For all Pirandello's apparently relentless honesty in telling us all the time about the illusions we are seeing, there is one trick he doesn't own up to - the one by which the author has contrived to deny any complex humanity to the "real" people.

But you don't have to be convinced by the play's argument to find it gripping and even moving. For the real drama happens, not on stage, but in the audience. All its philosophical cleverness and technical brilliance come down to one very simple thing, the indefatigable desire of the audience to feel for the six characters. That desire ultimately rises above the abstraction of the contrivance and in doing so provides a very special kind of drama, one in which the author dares the audience to find his work meaningless, knowing that we probably won't.

The play seems to try every possible wad of making us not care. It shows us that the stage we are watching is just a stage, that the actors are just actors, that the characters who invade their space are just literary inventions, stuck in a narrative that their author has abandoned. The story they have to try to finish is a hopelessly over wrought melodrama of infidelity, incest, accidental death and suicide. In it, the father (Gerard McSorley) abandons the mother. (Barbara Brennan) to another man, by whom she has three children. After some years, the father pursues them and ends up in a brothel with the wife's eldest daughter (Alison McKenna) by her lover. They are discovered by the wife and in the aftermath of this trauma, her other daughter drowns and her son shoots himself.

The excessive nature of the story ought to make it ludicrous. But it doesn't. Because they look like people, the characters evoke in us a basic compassion that goes beyond social and theatrical conventions. We may not know what is real and what is not, whether the dead son is an invention or a victim, but, we are still shocked at the sound of the bullet and the slump of the body. And this is what makes the play more than a museum piece: it recognises in the end: that even if suffering doesn't have a meaning, we can. choose to give it one.

ALL of this has, as well, a directness in the 1990s that it may have lacked in the 1920s. What was largely theoretical then is very real now in a world where the line between reality and illusion has been blurred by television. That may be part of the reason for the extraordinary immediacy of John Crowley's production. Watching it, you get the rare sense of a classic play being staged, not because it is venerable, but because it seems to grow out of previous work by the people involved.

Like Pirandello, Thomas Kilroy, who has written this version, has always been interested in role playing and in the connection between performance and power, and it shows in the lucidity and suppleness of his text. Equally, the play's fatalism is virtually continuous with Crowley's recent production of Phaedra at the Gate and this, too, shows in the rigour and assurance of the production and the acting.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, Gerard McSorley carries the pitch of epic despair from his performance in that production into this one. As the father he is simply superb. He has to present the impression of large emotions coming from nowhere, of a character without motive or previous life whose torment must still stir our compassion. He manages the feat of evoking resonant sounds from emptiness, like a great boom from a hollow drum. You can't take your eyes off him, or your mind off this dark concoction of magic and despair.