Resident Alien
February 4, 2009
New End Theatre
28 January - 5 April
I once had the misfortune of watching Tim Fountain get cajoled into drinking a glass of fresh urine during the course of a slightly riotous performance of his notorious one-man show, Sex Addict at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Thankfully, the return of Resident Alien, which Fountain has written and directed, leaves a more pleasant aftertaste.
Resident Alien premiered at the Bush Theatre in 1999 and has since had a handful of revivals both in the UK and in New York. Bette Bourne, who starred in the original Bush production and several other revivals to date, reprises his role as the legendary and effeminate eccentric, Quentin Crisp. Dirty, frail and dishevelled, we find him manned up at the age of 90 in his grotty one room apartment in a boarding house in New York. His musings range precariously over such far flung topics as the death of Princess Diana, politics, and book reviewing, but are always delivered with perfect comic timing and grace by the fabulous Bourne, who relishes the role from start to finish, spilling out his acerbic wit with a glittering eye and a wry smile.
One-man shows are notoriously risky, depending largely on the strength of their leading light, but on the 100th anniversary of Quentin Crisp’s birth, Bette Bourne, heaped with praise in previous renditions of the show, once again sails through the performance with style and showmanship, endowing Fountain’s script, which was written with Crisp’s full co-operation and the exclusive use of his New York Diaries, with a delicate energy. Bourne avoids relying too heavily on the entertainment value of Crisp’s observations, brilliantly quotable though they are, managing to bring the character to life as a sort of bravado spitting geriatric with a strangely haunted demeanour. Despite his many protestations to the contrary, the presence of a telephone that simply refuses to ring communicates a heart wrenching loneliness.
Designer Paul Shaw creates a suitably shabby set, reflecting Crisp’s total disdain for household chores such as washing up or dusting, and David W Kidd’s lighting design sees the room glowing from the stark light of a single uncovered bulb set starkly on an overflowing bookshelf, but Resident Alien’s success is owed in most part to Bourne, and his spectacularly robust performance.
-Kate Jackson
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