Masterful, disturbing take on theatre and reality

CAN actors really portray reality? And since we are, like Shakespeare wrote, merely players on this stage called life - do we really have to "craft" our stories so that they fit nicely within the four corners of a theatre stage? The existential nature of theatre was called into question in the seminal Italian play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, presented in a gripping performance by Teatre de la Ville of Paris last week.

The 1921 play by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, which French director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota believes brought European theatre into the modern era, showed us that the classics can still be very much a part of the largely contemporary programming of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA).

In this work that "navigated reality and fiction", Six Characters is a play within a play. Or rather, a play of reality butting into a play in rehearsal. The premise is classic, in that it questions the mode of theatre itself.