Presented by Guy Masterson’s Centre for International Theatre
@ Higher Ground – Main Theatre
SATURDAY 25th Feb (March 11 and March 15)

George Cockcroft’s The Dice Man has been sitting on my shelf with a bookmark three quarters of the way through for the last few weeks. It’s not that I’ve been lazy, that the prose was too difficult, or that  the plot was not enticing – quite the contrary. The simple fact to explain my lack of enthusiasm to finish the novel is that it is very, very frightening.

It isn’t full of murderers (well, mostly not). There aren’t ghosts, spells and tales of the occult. Instead, the fear is more cerebral. When the warped logic presented throughout the novel is coupled with with the unhinged, unlikable protagonist, and the breakdown in society around him the result is truly disquieting.

Luke Rhinehart is psychiatrist, a man and is completely tired of human shortcomings. He feels caged in by society and by his own profession. As a result he surrenders his personality completely to the die. They determine his decisions. They become his God.

“Understand yourself. See yourself. But don’t be yourself.”

The Six-Sided Man is the stage adaptation of this novel. Performed at Higher Ground in the middle of the day, it runs for 75 minutes and has only two actors; Gavin Robertson as The Man, and Nicholas Collett as The Psychiatrist.

The stage was fairly barren, consisting basically of three door-sized frames, a desk and some chairs. No props were used, with the actors relying almost exclusively on mime. Interestingly, in a play based on a man who uses dice to determine his actions, not a single die was to be seen.

This is not the book on stage. Instead, what writers Robertson and Andrew Dawson have done is break down the novel to its bare ideals, and presented these in an entirely new way. The Psychiatrist is never named as Rhinehart, and you hear nothing of the children he twists to the will of the die, and there is no mention of the neighbour he rapes and summarily begins an affair with.

Instead, the play consists predominantly of interactions between The Psychiatrist and The Man, with various bathroom scenes, radio interviews and visual interludes dispersed between. While Robertson remains The Psychiatrist for the entirety of the play, Collett takes on numerous roles, which at times could be a bit confusing. However, I don’t think this detracted from the show.

The writers did a phenomenal job in boiling down this story to its essence and adapting it to a live format and I enjoyed the entire performance. The main underlying ideals are still strongly present, and the dark humour of the book was maintained. However, where the play fell short was when it descended too far into humour. In one scene, they were building towards a tense confrontation, when in the middle of it they cracked out a psychiatrist joke which has been doing the inbox forwarding rounds for years. It ruined the moment, and in some ways cheapened the performance on either side of it.

In terms of comparison to the book, while the ideals are there, the disquiet is not. Darkness was sacrificed for audience comfort, which I think is a shame. The plot is muted. This aside, Robertson and Collett are to be highly commended on their performances.

Overall as a show, on its own merits this was a great performance, and whether you have read all of the book, half the book or none of the book, I strongly recommend it.