Review: Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness
March 11, 2009
Date reviewed: 10 March 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
First performed at Plymouth’s Drum Theatre in May 2002 with author Anthony Neilson as director, Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness has now been revived by Headlong and Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre, with Steve Marmion as director. The company, which recently produced cricketing comedy The English Game, professes to “aim constantly to push the imaginative boundaries of the stage”, and its decision to produce Edward Gant could hardly be more consistent with this objective. It is a vivid and searching depiction of a Victorian freak show’s last performance under the leadership of the insistently philosophical Gant.
Around two thirds of the play is dedicated to two stories that Gant considers to give insight into the role of loneliness in the human condition. Headlong’s deployment of visual and aural accompaniments, chiefly the work of designer Tom Scutt, lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth and composer Tom Mills, shrewdly makes full use of the play’s sprightly pace and replicates the style and technological limitations of a Victorian freak show evocatively, without doing so with such accuracy as to underwhelm an audience accustomed to more advanced alternatives. The representation of severe acne through a group of giant spots peeking through gaps in the set and goading their bearer to pop them is executed especially well. Furthermore, there is constant recognition both in these elements and the acting that, while the whole piece adopts a smugly facetious twenty-first century slant, much of the material is enjoyable irrespective of the fact that it has been peppered with irony. The audience is encouraged to think (and, indeed, enjoy) as two audiences, and this helps to render the production engaging.
Although inherently a jaunty but poignant work, the excellent cast must certainly take much credit for giving the play life. Despite the swift changes between parts, no performance is damp or wobbly. Simon Kunz offers passion and panache as Gant, and Paul Barnhill captures the frustration and feelings of alienation that his rebellious colleague Nicholas Ludd experiences. Emma Handy and Sam Cox, on the other hand, seize their characters within characters more splendidly, with Handy’s Louisa Von Kettelmein-Kurstein Frond and Fox’s Salvatore Avaricci among the strongest turns.
In the final third of the play performance and reality start to blur, and this anticipates a thought-provoking twist at the end. Aside from this theme, however, the play’s insightfulness is questionable. It undoubtedly raises deep questions – about the exploitation intrinsic to freak shows, the cruelty of comedy and suchlike – but you leave feeling broadly confused rather than challenged by anything specific, with the one aforementioned exception. As a production of this complex but clumsy play, there’s plenty to admire about this one. Yet the overriding impression that I left with was that the Victorians, however quaintly illiberal their attitudes, were incomparably cooler than those in the twenty-first century who replicate their outlook and behaviour with ironic fringes.
-Simon Walker
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