Comments on: Six Characters in Search of an Author | Sydney Festival & Headlong UK

By: Augusta Supple

Augusta Supple — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:26:25 +0000

I’m glad you enjoyed it Luke- Seems Steve Rodgers feels the same way… as does Jack Tiewes… and there is room for us all!
I do wonder how you will feel about the original text now you have experienced that interpretation of the play’s ideas? I’d love you to follow up and let me know if reading the text post show does enrich the experience further?
I can’t escape my own burdening context and knowing the play as well as I do- and being very familiar with several homages to the self-referential idea of text and ownership (including a play I short listed for Spankers last year)I felt it was nothing to write home about… but above all else- I love it when people have a good time at the theatre (even when I don’t)!

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:23:36 +0000

I’m going to say it… I loved it! I don’t know the original play at all, so this was my first exposure to the text. I found it to be a wonderfully theatrical experience about our sense or identity, reality, why (or perhaps how) are we on this road called life. It was wonderfully self-referential about it’s own story telling devices.

What is character? Who is an author? Who is the author of the words we utter, and are we the ones who speak the speech. I would go again!

I now want to read the original text to enrich the experience I’ve just had further.

By: David

David — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:27:00 +0000

Alas James, bad though this might have been, there is always the potential to see something far worse!

By: James Waite

James Waite — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:27:51 +0000

I was humbled to know that I had at last encountered the most boring piece of theatre ever conceived by literate humans – I feel like Hilary atop of Everest – at last – no further to go????

By: Augusta Supple

Augusta Supple — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:56:00 +0000

Thanks David- someone (another reviewer) asked me if I didn’t like it because I found it pretentious. It hadn’t occured to me that it was pretentious…(I think the point of Pirandello was to expose pretentiousness in storytelling and process) but it had occurred to me that it was boring.

By: David

David — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:20:44 +0000

An “overly cumbersome first half” is a deeply charitable way of describing it Augusta. The words I would use are patronising, overwritten, lazy, arrogant and shoddy. And the opening to the second half is possibly the weakest scene I have ever seen in the theatre.