The uninitiated often find it difficult to comprehend the struggles faced by actors as they tried to find their character and then maintain peak performance through a long run.
Katie Kitamura’s short but immaculately wrought novel takes us into the mind of an unnamed, 49-year-old leading actress as she goes through this process. It also goes far further, echoing Edward Albee in its search to distinguish perception from reality, as the actor gets further and further into the role, risking distancing herself from her own identity and even reality.
This is distinctively a novel of two halves. The first takes us through a tricky rehearsal period and, particularly, the fear that one tricky soliloquy might sink the Broadway arrival of what could be a sensational new writing talent. This begs the fascinating question as to whether the weak link is the actor, director or the script.
Throwaway anecdotes begin to take on greater significance, for example the sad story of an actor well past his sell-by date whose dementia contrarily results in a stunningly convincing performance.
In parallel with the show’s rehearsals, our leading lady not only develops long-standing connections with the director but also has a strange meeting with a young student, Xavier, who claims to be her long-lost adoptive son, although she had never put a child out for adoption. Being spotted by her stolid writer husband with a young man in a restaurant inevitably causes confusion, particularly since she has a track record of enduring rather than enjoying extramarital affairs.
This is all good stuff, but the story takes a significantly different turn in the second half when Xavier mysteriously takes a more significant part, moving into a key backstage role and also the apartment of the central couple. Thereafter, the arc of the show follows an inevitable, stratospheric course, while the arc of the “family” becomes increasingly opaque, contradictory and deliberately confused.
Audition is a very clever, intricately plotted and fascinating novel that both takes readers into the mind of an actor and explores the blurring between reality and perception in ways that are both novel and sometimes frightening.
Although it is drawn on a small scale, looking deeply into the souls of a handful of individuals, this could also be the kind of work that might ironically ultimately be turned into a stage play or even a movie.
Until then, it will delight anyone who enjoys novels about theatre or, for that matter, the vicissitudes of life when you begin to doubt your own visions and perceptions.