Reviews

I’m a Fool to Want You (tour)

Jazz rips right through this splendid piece from Told by an Idiot. It riffs off the walls and imbues every note and sequence of the plot and characters with a feeling of danger and spontaneity.

The life of the anarchic French jazz musician Boris Vian (Stephen Harper) is played out as he lies outside a cinema, apoplectic with rage and dying as a result of viewing the risible cinematic adaptation of his banned best-selling novel, I Spit on Your Graves.

As you might expect from such a free-form precis, Vian’s life is not given the full biographical treatment. Yet this little smattering of facts, developed effortlessly on a theme of surrealism, presents a life which is still so bizarre that you would be hard pressed to make it up.

The surrealism trip manifests itself most coherently in Naomi Wilkinson‘s set, dominated by a vertical wall that has all the appearances – including furniture – of being a floor. Not only does this create a feeling of dislocation and the odd moment of comedy, it also serves as a frame on which the company can practise their own brand of physical theatre.

There could be no jazz without music. Zoe Rahman‘s piano score – which she plays live, becoming a part of the plot and a passive participant in the action – provides the framework for the story. It’s augmented by a series of trumpet improvisations, which Adrian Williams Longo plays, for the most part, off stage.

It takes a strong performance from Stephen Harper to bring any coherence to the plot. It is not individual scenes – such as when the very wonderful Hayley Carmichael, as the enigmatic Ursula Gruber, challenges Vian to write a best-selling novel in ten days – but the way in which they’re strung together and conflated with acted-out scenes from the movie.

The overall result sometimes has a tendency to try a little too hard to be wacky. Still, all the really difficult things in I’m a Fool to Want You – like bringing a sense of strong narrative drive to the fragmentary whole or Carmichael’s creation of many different characters – are done so well as to appear effortless.

– Thom Dibdin (reviewed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh)