Notes from Underground

Perrier Award winner Will Adamsdale is a likeable stand-up comedian with a decent roster of acting credits. His performance as Eric Bogosian’s fantasising New York loser in Notes from Underground in the smaller of the Trafalgar Studios therefore combines his talents for buttonholing an audience and getting inside another character’s skin.

What is so disarming about the unnamed hero is his apparent normality. He watches Saturday Night Live and doesn’t see the point. He feels berated by Oprah Winfrey. He seeks out Picasso’s “Guernica” in the Museum of Modern Art. He maps out the exact topography of the Upper East Side on his perambulations while standing in a roomful of magazines and memories. But he also wonders why life cannot be simple, like masturbation.

Gradually we realise that this man is talking to us because there is no one else in his life. One often feels at solo shows that the trigger has been forgotten; why, after all, should someone start spouting in this way? The confessional becomes a little more sinister as the points of reference begin to include baby blankets, kitchen knives, sleeping pills and cheddar cheese crackers. He reveals a slightly unhealthy obsession with the CBS television anchorman Dan Rather. Familiarity can breed over-familiarity, and later, contempt.

He mysteriously manages to achieve an act of seduction on the eleventh floor of the Carlyle Hotel, one of New York’s smartest addresses. He observes small children playing in the day care centre. He gets dressed. The stage is suddenly filled with an avalanche of biros.

The overall impression is of a small figure trying to make his voice heard in an overwhelming environment. The pressure of the large metropolis both terrifies and liberates him, and it is as if this performance is a holding operation, a short stop on the road to either catastrophe or oblivion.

You can be destroyed or fulfilled by New York said the novelist EB White, whose elegant observations on New York are a byword in the city’s literature, and who wrote such classics for children as Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Bogosian’s hero leaves the issue, the fictional resolution, in the balance while suggesting the outcome. Adamsdale’s performance is both disturbing and touching, visions of Everyman in the nightmare world of urban America, a lost creature on the city register.

– Michael Coveney