Six Characters in Search of an Author

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

In Luigi Pirandello’s classic from 1921, the rehearsal of a play is interrupted early by a shock arrival – six mysterious figures have a story to tell and no one to tell it. “There’s no author here,” they’re told. “It’s not a new play we’re doing.” In Pirandello’s play, a troubled family history unravels while the theatre hosts a teasing blur of illusion and reality.

In Dublin Youth Theatre’s performance, a group of Dublin Youth Theatre members attempt to stage a Dublin Youth Theatre show, loosely inspired by Pirandello, but are interrupted much, much later by the muted arrival of two mysterious figures with a story to tell and a vague desire to share it. “There’s no writer here,” they are told. “It’s a devised piece.”

In DYT’s new show, it barely distracts from a slightly different agenda: to play games with reality and reality theatre.

It takes a particular talent to out-meta Pirandello, but the funkiest thing about director Jason Byrne and assistant director Grace Dyas’s collaboration with DYT is a Pirandellian deconstruction of post-dramatic devices, which have become the default setting of youth theatre groups.

Dyas’s company Theatreclub, for instance, are all DYT alumni and while there’s a shared aesthetic here with Byrne’s mumblecore style of underplaying, Dyas’s wry self-reflexivity or the playful clutter of Brokentalkers – previous directors of DYT – there’s an equal desire to undercut it.

Sometimes that approach leads the young cast – all of them dry and knowing – into loops, then knots of irony as their own rehearsals and jokes about tardiness begin repeating.

But there’s something quite riveting about the arrival of the characters, precisely because, unlike Pirandello’s, they cause no sensation. Instead Alice Murphy and Gabrielle Murphy drag an adolescent sullenness into the too-cool agenda. It’s no more real than a hipper-than-thou cast playing themselves with suspiciously well co-ordinated Converse, but this artifice is somehow more convincing.

That the characters don’t persist long is a pity – in DYT’s production, the Actors regain control – but in the fascinating tension between the wayward flow of life and the fixity of art Pirandello and DYT are still closely aligned, asking questions of themselves and the stage that can never be answered. Who are we?