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
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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