Waiting Like a Man - An Unusually True Story

Synopsis

Taking in love, life and death across four generations of fathers, Waiting Like a Man is a charming, hilarious and unusually honest account of one boy’s journey to manhood. When Daniel’s father dies (don’t worry, it gets more cheerful), he soon stumbles upon the mystery of his great-grandfather’s murder (no, really it does). Determined to expose the truth behind his family’s past, he travels as far afield as Richmond in an unstoppable journey, interrupted only for occasional YouTube marathons and toy soldier re-enactments of the Battle of Passchendaele. But when his fiance asks him to pick up a pregnancy test on the way home, Daniel realises he's nowhere near ready to grow up himself, let alone to help someone else. Watch one man tackle these issues and more, in a race against time and fatherhood.

Our Review:

14 July 2011

Not everyone has an intriguing story of a murdered relative buried in their family history. And very few, one imagines, could turn that story into such an entertainingly whimsical one-man show as Daniel Benoliel’s Waiting Like a Man.

Benoliel takes as his starting point the death of his father, among whose effects he finds a cryptic paragraph about a murder in a Manchester factory. After a little research (his encounters with archives and archive-dwellers are wittily recounted), he discovers that the murdered man was his great-grandfather, the cue for him to delve more deeply into his family history. Meanwhile, his own wife falls pregnant, causing him to view his investigations through the prism of his impending fatherhood.

All of this is lightly handled by Benoliel, a polished performer who moves smoothly between self-deprecating humour and caricatured set pieces (his telling of the murder in the style of a bedtime story for a friend’s...

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