Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars A spotlight shines on a bowler-hatted man stood in the corner of the stage. He speaks to the audience directly, peels a banana and watches another spotlight beside him, waiting for the show to begin. Barry McGovern's opening gambit in his solo stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, is pure vaudeville. When the curtain rises, McGovern is tucked into a gravestone grey room before launching into what are revealed as a series of profoundly funny comic routines that lifts Beckett's prose off the page for a deeply entertaining eighty-five minute tour de force. The comedy is most evident in Molloy, as the ageing some-time vagrant now living with his mother regales us through the incident and colour of his day with deadpan guilelessness. So obsessive is Molly's description of how to cope with juggling stones between pockets that it appears borderline OCD before he realises the pointlessness of his activities. Malone Dies finds our hero laid out on a slab waiting to expire. This too becomes a hilarious litany of life and death which is delivered with a sense of timing many Fringe comedians could learn much from. Only in the final part of Colm O Briain's production do things get really serious, as McGovern, on his knees and shirtless, punctures the mood with a relentless monologue on identity, reinvention, the nature of existence and the need to find meaning, even as you become narrator of your own fiction. It is twenty-seven years since McGovern first performed I'll Go On at Edinburgh's Assembly Rooms. Age has brought an even greater understanding of this mighty piece of existential music hall. The Herald, August 27th 2013 ends
Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
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