A man who has been travelling stands on stage. He has just arrived from somewhere else – some nameless place known for exporting ‘sarcasm and uric acid’. He addresses the people in the place where he has arrived but that can be equally indeterminate.
Gare St Lazare Players return to Edinburgh with the UK premiere of this brilliantly crafted monologue from award-winning New York playwright Will Eno. Actor Conor Lovett conducts a rambling yet strangely interconnected conversation with the audience that holds echoes of Beckett. Full of surprising and at times funny topics from birth to death with a maze of turns in between are covered with his own brand of casually matter of fact philosophy.
Lovett questions directly while never truly expecting an answer. There are familiar compass points throughout yet there is of a sense of the bizarre. We are not quite in the world of the absurd but the feeling is strong that it is lurking around like one of Flann O’Brien’s bicycles. Lovett gives a consummate and utterly engrossing performance as this ‘un-homed’ being who sometimes refers to humans as though they are alien and at other times as though nothing other than human. The language lends itself beautifully to the Irish delivery with deliciously surprising turns of phrase like a woman having a ‘pretty way of cringing’ that ‘love is a many splintered thing’ or sailing the ‘seventy seas’.
This is a compelling and intimate stravaig round the topic of home with a message of ‘don’t get lost for too long or people will stop looking’.
31 July – 25 August
18.05