I JUST STOPPED BY TO SEE THE MAN. To 15 October.
Bolton
I JUST STOPPED BY TO SEE THE MAN
by Stephen Jeffreys
Octagon Theatre To 15 October 2005
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 8, 12 Oct 2pm
Audio-described 12 Oct 7.30pm
BSL Signed 6 Oct
Runs 3hr One interval
TICKETS: 01204 520661
www.octagonbolton.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 September
The Octagon on song, with a bravura central performance.This represents a joy of repertory companies, when an artistic director finds space for a play they admire, something off the beaten track of accepted hits. Mark Babych gives a blazing revival of Stephen Jeffreys' 2000 drama about a young rock musician visiting an old Blues singer, so forgotten people have believed him dead for over a decade. It's a slow-burning piece. Little happens, and when it does it's usually offstage. But over the course of 3 hours, Babych and this cast build the intensity in Stephen Jeffreys' taut drama.
The length's absolutely necessary; this play's about drawing people painfully from their hidden places. Karl needs the old blues singer whose house he initially breaks into. Jesse's daughter relies on her father being thought dead, so his apparently deserted home can be her refuge. Between these two, Jesse has to dig into his past, recovering from an old age spent idly tossing coins into a hat, the depths of his soul.
It's not without cost; whatever's thought further afield, locals know Jesse's alive and his resumption of the Blues, the Devil's music, has him hounded from the congregation. Jesse himself played with Robert Johnson, subject of the Blues-singer myth of a diabolic midnight meeting at a cross-roads, selling his soul in return for the Devil tuning his guitar to play like no-one else before.
The dark atmosphere, the secrecy and searching for light are represented in Hannah Clark's set, a sparse wooden diagonal room between chilly white blooms growing among the rocks. And in the moody lighting Thomas Weir throws across this space, sometimes shadowily reflecting the gloom surrounding these characters' lives, at other times opening out a chilly, white optimism.
Though it took some time for me to key into Hannah Lockerman's articulation she and James Clyde play a fine rough cat-and-mouse game, wary and ready to pounce for what each is after. The heart of the production though is Wyllie Longmore's performance-of-a-lifetime Jesse, tall and impressive in repose, giant in moral stature when he rises to the occasion, singing the Blues. This is the Octagon on song.
Karl: James Clyde
Della: Hannah Lockerman
Jesse: Wyllie Longmore
Director: Mark Babych
Designer: Hannah Clark
L8ighting: Thomas Weir
Sound: Andy Smith
Musical adviser: Howard Gay
Dialect coach: Lise Olson
2005-09-29 14:36:54