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| Who'd do a monologue, eh? Getting up on stage by yourself
to face a towering barrage of blankly inscrutable faces evaluating your
every move. Having to maintain both decent a depth of characterisation and
a level of timing to ensure that the audience is given the chance to be
interested and engaged by the material. Knowing that the slightest inconsistency
could ruin everything. Having no one else to blame for any fuck-ups.
Now, ratchet up the monologue count to ELEVEN and take a script by Eric Bogosian, where characters often change or reveal things about themselves very quickly, and you have some indication of precisely what director/performer Marcus Dilly has left himself to do. Pounding nails into the ground with his forehead sounds both infinitely preferable and more attainable. It is to his great credit then, that Dilly puts on an excellent show. In each of the show's (unrelated) monologues he takes on a difficult character, and manages to become that character. He manages to tread that fine line between showing us these, in some cases, genuinely awful and pathetic people and yet still letting the audience not feel completely distanced from them, allowing us to feel pity for them, even sometimes to care for them. Bogosian's script revels in the differences between the characters, skilfully deploying different verbal textures for each character. The eleven characters are all American stereotypes of one form or another, each of whom is having to cope with the reality of living in a time of a "mass media machine". Though the social satire occasionally breaks into the realm of the overly preachy, the main attraction of the script is the brilliant humour that Bogosian wrings out of his eleven caricatured creations. And Dilly conveys this humour with both an excellent control of tone and some impeccable timing. Even the short gaps between monologues after which Dilly often comes out looking completely unrecognisable aren't boring. The monologues are interspersed with well-chosen music which sustains the high level of the show's tempo. I look forward to seeing what Cracked Actor productions have to offer next. Munzar Sharif, 24.04.03 |
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