If you think the critic's function is parasitic, wait till you hear Pirandello on actors. The writer's famed distinction between reality and illusion makes it plain, in Six Characters at least, that actors are as removed from the blood and smew of real feeling as the recording angels of the centre stalls.

The mummer's endemic shallowness is underlined by Michael Rudman's new production at the Olivier. In the original, the theatre company that we meet in the throes of rehearsing another Pirandello play, The Rules of the Game, is not obtrusively characterized. Personalities are fleetingly illuminated by the odd detail But the irrelevant waffle of Nicholas Wright's new version plunges, heaven help us, into a backstage comedy, as stereotype thespians swap banalities and Leslie Sands's old stager confuses Polonius with the Gravedigger. (Though still rooted in Twenties Italy, the company is preparing Hamlet.) It might be Rattigan's Harlequinade. On the lethargic second Press night this embarrassing attempt to individualise the boys and girls were hampered by the listless snail's pace and, from the smaller roles, a delivery of lines ('Shh—look!"What's going on?') that was little better than amateur—Paul Hastings' sympathetic and lively vignette as Horatio always excepted.

In an attempt, presumably, to anglicise and modernise the frame of emotional reference, if not the setting, Wright and Rudman flatly contradict the original at some points. The mysterious family, frozen forever in some ghastly tragedy, who interrupt the proceedings and beg to be dramatised, should enter normally but be noticeably 'different' (Pirandello suggested half-masks). Here they suddenly appear in a black-out to a clap of thunder, but are thereafter 'normal' to the point of triviality. Pirandello ends his play with the 'producer stumbling terrified through the darkened theatre at the final vision of those figures fixed in an eternity of anguish—like the still-living acquaintance whom Dante sighted in the Inferno: he lives and breathes and goes about his business but he is already in hell—and, to the mocking laughter of the Stepdaughter who breaks the confines of stage, auditorium and building, we remember Petrushka's showman, appalled at the doll's ghost, at the spectacle of something created assuming an independent existence At the Olivier the imperturbable Director (Robin Bailey, whose drily undercutting smoothness provides the evening's mam pleasure) utters the character's last line, asking for more light, and settles down at his desk. And that's that.

Throughout, the supernatural is hinted at (though Italians, the Sicilian awe of the evil eye apart, are robustly disinclined to feerie) while formality is rendered dully prosaic. The result is J. B. Priestley crossed with Tom Stoppard: as it were, The Real Inspector Hound Calls.

Everything is emphatic, pedantic; and this affects the playing. Lesley Sharp, a powerful actress as we know from the Royal Court, makes a liberated, hectoring Stepdaughter. She suggests little horror at being pushed across the narrow divide between respectable poverty and the shame of prostitution. She, or the director, confuses intensity with earnestness. And she is lumbered with that modern semi-literate Americanism that someone at the NT should have blue-pencilled at rehearsal stage when announcing that she is 'nauseous'. No, Miss Sharp; your lines may be nauseous. You are nauseated.

Richard Pasco goes along with the prevalent mood by playing the lustful Stepfather as a verbose, almost professorial, droll. Barbara Jefford, as we were reminded by the Fellini film, And the Ship Sails On , has a potentially riveting star presence. By no means is she the cowed, illiterate little wife, perpetually bowed in shame (I wish I'd seen her Stepdaughter in the 1963 production). Ralph Fiennes carries off the...