"Right to the end, you can't quite decide whether he is a hero, a victim, or a villain … Lesley Manville gives a performance of high-definition gloss … and there is strong support from Anthony Head as her smooth art dealer husband. "Sexy, fluent, assured and with an edge of both neediness and danger," says Spencer, describing not himself but Obi Abili, who plays Paul the conman. " intriguingly hints that our lives are all confidence tricks." The acting, too, is universally agreed to be superb. "It has pace and wit," Hitchings concedes.
Surprisingly, beside their distaste for the script, all three men admire the quality of David Grindley's production. "Guare's device of having characters address the audience directly is grating," he continues, "and we are left wishing they were less like hard-edged objects and more rounded emotionally." On this, at least, Billington and Hitchings would agree.Ĭharles Spencer of the Telegraph joins the gang: "The play is smart, sharp, funny and briefly touching," he says, softening Guare up before delivering a heavy right hook, "but it is essentially little more than an enjoyable comedy about a con artist, continually burdened by faux profundity, not least the modish notion that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by a chain of just six other people." "It's a gimmicky and rather dated satire, packed with knowing allusions and pleased with its lightweight philosophising," says young Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard. "It still strikes me as an ingenious artefact rather than a play that embodies its ideas emotionally in the manner of the great American dramatists."Īnd now, thanks to the revival of Six Degrees at the Old Vic, a new generation of British theatre critics has had the chance to be underwhelmed by it all over again.
"I was distinctly underwhelmed by Guare's play when I first saw it at the Royal Court in 1992," the Guardian's Michael Billington remembers. Three and a half thousand miles and two decades away, however, not everybody is convinced. Though when John Guare dazzled Broadway in 1990 with this semi-fictional play about a young black conman inveigling his way into the bosom of the hypocritical New York bourgeoisie, he seemed to have managed it. P ity the poor playwright who tries to be clever they had better pull it off.
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