BWW Reviews: THE TRAGEDIAN, Riverside Studios, June 6 2011

The history of acting is littered with hellraisers who lived fast, died young and left a beautiful corpse. One such is Edmund Kean, born in 1789 and dead just 44 years later. In The Tragedian (at the Riverside Studios until July 2) Alister O'Loughlin portrays - no, that's too passive a verb - becomes the 26 year-old Kean, poised on the verge of making his reputation at Drury Lane, and losing the younger of his two sons.

Over 70 minutes on a bare stage save a trunk of outlandish costumes, O'Loughlin prowls, sometimes working with members of the audience, sometimes pantomiming, sometimes tumbling, but always radiating the kind of energy and charisma that separated Kean from hundreds of other itinerant actors looking for the big break. We hear of Kean's upbringing (such as it was), his marriage, his whoring, his drinking, his successes, his failures, his hopes, his grief and his bright, soon to become dark future. He would be English Theatre Bad Boy Number 1 if the E! Channel had been around in 1814 - yep, a Colin Farrell who could actually act.

The play is billed as "Berkoff presents" and you can see why. O'Loughlin's performance is reminiscent of Berkoff at his best - snarling and smiling, funny and frightening, crude and cultured. As a one-man play about one actor, there's a danger that the whole thing could be just too much, just too self-referential, but O'Loughlin (who also wrote the script) avoids that dead end by showing us how much of an extraordinary life lived 200 years ago was in thrall to the same demons that plague us today.     

 

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