Pirandello’s Cast of ‘Characters’ Come to Cable Life

The daring idea at the heart of Luigi Pirandello’s brilliant, sorrowful play, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” is that fictional characters can be more real, true and vital than living human beings.

Taken to one extreme, this notion can lead to fascism--which it certainly did for some of Pirandello’s friends a little more than a decade after he brought out his revolutionary work in 1921. Taken another way, “Six Characters” was a liberation for the theater.

The concept of having six characters come out of nowhere and assert their heart and soul for a director and his cast of actors doesn’t seem nearly as wild now as it did then, and the play now gets too easily turned into an arid exercise in ideas. Director Bill Bryden’s television version for BBC Scotland (and airing on the Bravo channel’s “Texaco Performing Arts Showcase” series) replaces the proscenium with a movie sound stage, and adapter Michael Hastings has replaced Pirandello’s stage references with cinematic ones. It’s a terrific fit.

Bryden slyly does two things that make this a remarkable version. First, he has shot it in a wide-screen format, the image letter-boxed to heighten the feeling of a cinema screen. Second, while he shoots the film crew and the sniping actors from a distance, he trains his camera on the intruding characters, their faces enveloping the screen as their identities are willed into existence. Bryden lets them take over the lens.

Oh, and one last thing: Bryden assembles a fiery cast spewing more energy than the tube can really contain. John Hurt leads the group as the patriarch character, a figure invested with excruciating pain as he sees the mistakes in his family life come back to haunt him. Hurt’s character, though, also functions as Pirandello’s critical voice, forcing the director (Brian Cox) to confront the line between illusion and reality. Hurt’s is a tour de force of emotion and intellect, and some of this actor’s finest work in years.

As the daughter-in-law character fallen into prostitution and consumed with boundless contempt for her whole family, Tara Fitzgerald is fearless, almost daring the camera to keep up with her as she shoots wicked stares or erupts with possibly the most evil, cackling laugh in TV history. Susan Fleetwood makes her long-suffering mother character’s pathos operatic, intensely humanizing an archetype. Cox quietly builds up his director’s astonishment at seeing characters come to life before him, but knows when he has a good thing for a movie and gets down to business.

The effect might seem to the viewer like an extremely elegant “Twilight Zone” episode (the production was shot in black and white), but that would be getting it backward. Rod Serling stole from Pirandello, and he never, ever had actors like these.

“This is our reality!” Hurt’s character screams at one point to the director, and the human anguish of this living, two-legged fiction is the actor at the height of his game.

* “Six Characters in Search of an Author” airs at 6:35 tonight on the Bravo channel.