Dundee Rep, 28 March 2012, and touring

EVERYONE in Garry Robson’s wordy drama, based on real events in 1936, is living the life of someone they are not.

THERE is John Gielgud, making a name for himself as a leading player on the classical stage, but rather more comfortable in the guise of Hamlet than in his own buttoned-up persona. He is also in deep denial about his homosexuality and finds it easier to play the role of a straight man who happens not to have found the right woman yet. Played by Laurie Brown, in this Birds of Paradise production, he is distant, timid and not fully himself.

Karina Jones in The Man Who Lived Twice (photo Eamonn McGoldrick)

Then there is Edward Sheldon, the American playwright, whose paralysis and blindness mean he has little life of his own to lead. When he’s not trading on past glories, he prefers to live vicariously through the stories of the glamorous coterie of stars he gathers around his bedside. Played by Paul Cunningham, he is a motionless figure in shades, wrapped in the black drapes of Kenny Miller’s set and looking like the kind of isolated character you’d come across in a Samuel Beckett play.

The metaphor is extended to Archie, Sheldon’s pet macaw whose dialogue is made up entirely of borrowed phrases. This bird has no contribution of its own to make, just the hollow echo of other people’s voices. Played by Karina Jones, this soulless bird is dressed up like the flamboyant corbie in Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off – a play director Alison Peebles knows well, having starred in the original Communicado production and directed it since.

Sadly, it would take more than a talking bird, Ross Brown’s period-style songs and the baroque stylings of Miller’s design to make Robson’s script dynamic. Although the playwright is an actor himself, The Man who Lived Twice is a surprisingly untheatrical piece of writing. It could adapt to radio without any major modifications, but even on radio, I suspect it would seem ponderous and uncertain in purpose.

To its credit, the production does not suffer from the problem you’d expect when an actor has to play Gielgud – Brown pulls it off admirably with no hint of hubris, and even Jones gets away with doubling as Mrs Patrick Campbell, albeit with too little actorly grandeur. But what they can’t do is give clarity to a script that provides too little indication about what the characters want and what’s driving them to talk as endlessly as they do.

The Man Who Lived Twice is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 4 April 2012.

© Mark Fisher, 2012

Links

• Birds of Paradise
• Mark Fisher