MARYLEBONE THEATRE LONDON – UNTIL 20th APRIL 2024
REVIEWED BY JACKIE THORNTON
3***
A lone suitcase is spotlit centre stage as our nameless protagonist, played with wonderful range and subtlety by veteran Greg Hicks, walks on, dressed in off-white, to tell us how ridiculous everyone always thought he was and how much of an outsider he feels. It’s Wednesday and he’s come to the conclusion that the world has no meaning and so needs to do something about it.
Hicks is the sole performer in writer/director Laurence Boswell’s adaptation of Dostoyevksy’s 1877 political allegory and the actor skillfully changes accent and posture, using simple props to take on the guise of other characters he encounters in his tragi-comic adventure. Particularly memorable is a cap that becomes an immigrant child
asking for help who he heartlessly pushes away.
Loren Elstein’s stage design is minimalist but brings the vast backdrop of the stage to life aided by Ben Ormerod’s lighting, which takes us from rainy, traffic-filled London to an imagined paradise of sandy beaches and pink skies.
Gary Sefton’s sound design startled me more than once with loud clashes of thunder and kept tension alive with an overall unsettling mood. Humour is evoked as our protagonist tells us how he forged a career, lost a career, got married, got divorced, reminding us of life’s inevitable losses and gains. This modern day ridiculous man, an unemployed introverted loner living in East London takes us through his despair with life and growing need to end it all. Boswell makes it relevant without feeling like a sermon, observing that, “polarisation and condemnation” seem to be “the dominant form of interaction between people” these days.
Just how ridiculous is this man’s dream of a world filled with kindness, compassion and love and why does it still feel impossible?