Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness at Soho Theatre

Edward Gant is a travelling showman of the Victorian era, a self proclaimed prodigy, soldier, traveller and poet. Dapper in topper and tails and impeccable of moustache, he awes his audience with freakish tales of broken hearts and suppurating skin.

This revival of Anthony Neilson’s 2002 play is a mish-mash of things. Presented as a recreation of a stage show of 1881, The Amazing Feats of Loneliness of the title, it is, initially at least, a blend of the grotesque and the crudely comic, full of nudge-nudge humour and waves of pus and vomit.

A young woman afflicted with acne finds that her face has the capability to produce pearls; a man hikes to the Himalayas to have the images of his dead love literally drilled out of existence; a (human sized) stuffed bear recounts its abandonment by its owner.

It is like The League of Gentlemen at their most perverse, veering at times into Little Britain territory as bodily fluids gush over the floor. But as with Neilson’s other recent plays, the disappointing God in Ruins and divisive The Wonderful World of Dissocia, there are different layers of reality at work here. As with both those productions there is a Pirandellian fracturing of the world we are presented with. There are jarring pauses, as Gant’s fellow performers grow increasingly uncomfortable with their opium-addicted boss. The play begins to pick itself apart, to reveal something unexpected and altogether more human and questioning beneath the sticky veneer.

That said, this late detour doesn’t quite emerge clean from the grossness of the earlier scenes; it remains tainted. The audience never learn enough about Gant and his troupe to fully engage with this new turn of events. There are intriguing hints of a friendship forged on the battlefield between Gant and Sam Cox’s Jack Dearlove, but given the time devoted to pus and pimples in the early half of the play, this remains frustratingly thinly sketched. There is also an attempt to raise the question of what one wants theatre to do: encapsulated in a poem that pits whimsy against hard reality. But again this feels secondary to the yucky stuff. The final revelation, when it comes however, is still quite potent.

The cast are excellent. Simon Kunz has just the right amount of swagger as Gant and Sam Cox, Nicholas Ludd and Emma Handy, leaping between roles, are all equally strong, the latter impressively managing to emote from behind a mask of acne. Tom Scutt’s Victorian set is full of lovely details and, to be fair, the audience seemed to be laughing a great deal, for it is at times wickedly, weirdly funny. But it is impossible to shake a sense of frustration that this could have been far more interesting were it to focus less on gross excess and more on the characters that populate this intriguing world.


Reviewed for musicOMH

Relocated at the Royal Court

I don’t recall having a reaction to a production quite this strong in a while. I have tried to articulate what I found so unpalatable about Anthony Neilson’s current show at the Royal Court over on the Guardian's arts blog. I’m not wild about the headline, but then I did make use of the c-word (compassion), so I can hardly complain. It’s also worth mentioning that I hadn’t read Neilson’s response to Michael Billington’s one star review when I wrote it, as I filed my post the day before.

I do wonder if it’s an intellectual failing on my part that I let my emotional response to the play dominate. But then the fact that I had such a strong, near physical, reaction to the production is testament in a way to its success (on some levels at least). However I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something cheap and opportunistic about including such overt references to the Fritzl case – something Neilson was able to do given his particular habit of up-to-the-minute rewriting - though again I think this may say more about my oversensitivity; few people, bar Billington, appear to have found this as problematic as I did. It’s not that I felt it was distasteful (oh, OK, maybe I did a bit) but that it felt as if it had been included simply because it happened and he could.

Curiously, as anyone who has been stuck in a tipsy top-ten films type conversation with me will know, I rank Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Know as one of my favourite films and am rather partial to a bit of J-horror, particularly Hideo Nakata's Dark Water. Relocated shares much with both these films, indeed part of me revelled in the way the production seemed able to tap into so many cinematic worlds while retaining its own sense of identity. But there was something at the heart of this production I found repellent and I couldn’t get past that. It crossed, or rather removed, some necessary line. It leaked into the real world like a girl with long dark hair crawling through a television screen.

Bah Humbug!

I feel somewhat torn. On one hand I am glad that a company like the RSC is willing to work with someone like Anthony Neilson, to do something a bit daring, a bit experimental, to take a chance on a more collaborative – and initially script-less – way of working. (Brian Logan goes into the details of the creative process on his GU blog).

But then I get to the show itself, the finished product, God In Ruins, which I saw last night at Soho Theatre with my friend Juice, and my enthusiasm wavers. I just didn’t think it was all that good. It didn’t even seem like a brave failure, more a muddle of ideas, many of which I’d seen better executed elsewhere. While Neilson’s previous work, The Wonderful World Of Dissocia managed to be compelling and infuriating in equal measure, this new one was – cardinal sin in Neilson’s book – kind of on the dull side: there was something rather tired and lifeless about the play, beneath all the swearing and shouting.

It starts with a mildly amusing prologue in which Ebenezer Scrooge, now fully redeemed after his encounter with his three ghosts, turns out to be just as insufferable in his new perky and life-loving incarnation as his old bah-humbug self. This did make me chuckle a little, but it was essentially one joke, and a rather over stretched one.

The play then jumps forward to the present and we meet Brian, a divorced, alcoholic reality TV producer. Having been rude to his ex-wife and failed to tip a pizza delivery man, he has his own Scrooge moment when he is visited by the white-suited ghost of dead dad, there to help him reconnect with his estranged daughter. Even at this early point in the evening there’s a seen-it-before feel to the set up: a heartless TV exec forced to confront his mortality, wasn’t that Scrooged? Even his reality shows have a ring of the familiar to them, like Chimp Monastery – Monkey Tennis, anyone?

There’s also an internet porn sequence that reminded me of Closer, even more so when the truth behind it is revealed, and a not–quite-as-funny-as-it-could-have-been interlude where two small boys discuss the fact that Santa is actually dead and it’s their parents that really buy the presents, which features liberal use of the underused put down ‘pooh head.’

This is followed by a bizarrely studenty, post-modern moment when the characters become aware that they are in a theatre and that they are being watched by an audience. A further layer of artifice is then peeled away as a ‘real’ homeless man bursts into the auditorium and interrupts proceedings, claiming to be an ex-soldier, just back, oddly, from Iran. If this was meant to indicate a slightly futuristic setting, it passed me by – I was too busy wondering why Scrooge from the opening sequence had popped up to help Brian on his way; was he a ghost? A drunken hallucination? Did it even matter?

To be fair, there were a handful of good gags, but most of the laughter I could hear was of the uneasy ‘this is supposed to be a funny bit, right?’ type – forced and awkward. As a whole, the production often seemed to be striving incredibly hard to be anarchic, and coming nowhere near. Brian, eventually finds his daughter, in Second Life, but as Juice pointed out to me in the bar afterwards, he was actually desperate to get in touch with her at the start and was only unable to because he was pissed out of his head, so it’s not much of a redemption. Though there’s also a suggestion that Brian’s unhappiness might be down to some latent homosexuality on his part.

I don’t know, I hate to tip a bagful of negative over a work that takes risks, that tries something different, but none of the disparate elements of this show seemed to fit well with one another and, on top of that, there was a sense of over-confidence to the thing – a touch of swagger about it – that I found very off-putting.