Review: Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Edward Gant’s a showman. (He wears a showman’s hat.) He tells cor-blimey stories and he lives, well, a nomadic existence scouring the farthest corners of the globe for specimens of solitude.

Gant’s travelling show, presented in Neilson’s play more as historical reconstruction than fiction, has all the grandiose flourish of Victoriana: R’s roll on into infinity and velvet curtains swish open in revelation. Gasps are his currency and marvels his expertise. From the moment he appears, swelling into three dimensions as an image of Man made flesh, Gant never misses a trick – appearing from portraits and portals all the stage over, glossing everything with an opulent sentiment and absorbing mystique.

His tales of the lonesome are at once delightful and yet, in their representation by a small troupe of actors, retain the boisterous colour of the Beano. An acne-ridden Italian belle whose pustules sprout pearls is harvested rather than truly loved; a widowed aristocrat desperate to escape the haunting memories of his absent love erases the good with the bad; and an actor, drying onstage, is lost to a purgatory of discarded teddy-bears. Yet, Neilson infuses them with a refreshing hint of modernity, peppering them with crude asides and innuendo.

However, Neilson gets too clever in revealing a second layer of reality. As Gant’s show collapses in mutiny, it undermines itself. The supposedly real seems all the more false with its scripted spontaneity and assurances that this has never happened before. With this in mind, Neilson’s twist, which I shan’t reveal, doesn’t pack enough punch to pay truly off and leave us wondering into the night aghast.

Though it is played, directed and designed with gusto, cheek and charm by Headlong, Neilson’s play emerges adrift. Had he been content to offer Calvino-like moralistic morsels in context, it would have achieved far stronger results. Instead, he opts to hammer home the simultaneous powers and oddities of representation and, in doing so, saps it of its mystery.