Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness
Soho Theatre, London
MOST creative artists are sensitive to the spirit of the times – the best seem to anticipate the future. What they feel today will be reality tomorrow. Take the case of playwright Anthony Neilson. In about 2001, he wrote Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness, a show which stages the tension between literal meaning and metaphorical meaning. And guess what? Some five years later, this was – and still is – a hot topic on blogs and in discussions.
The play, which was first staged in 2002 and is now revived by the Headlong theatre company, is ostensibly culled from a manuscript unearthed from 1881, and is written in a nice mix of parodic Victorianism and in-your-face directness. Neilson’s show, which looks like one of those 19th-century fairground freak-mobile displays, is about, in his words, not physical malformation, but mental deformities – “those of the heart and mind”.
Introduced by Edward Gant, the
90-minute trip starts off with a charmingly sad Cinderella-like tale. Set in Italy, it shows the conflict between two sisters, the normal Campanettei (played by a man) and the ugly Sanzonetta (played by a woman). But the latter has one advantage over her sister: she is able to create pearls. How she does this is pretty disgusting and the show lurches into a hilarious gross-out.
The second story told by the ever-fizzy Gant concerns Edgar Thomas Dawn, a British Army man who seeks help from an Indian guru in order to forget his one true love, who has died in farcical circumstances. However, he soon finds that the cure is worse than the illness and his lovesickness — but no, I can’t give any more of the plot away.
What I can say is that, towards the end, the events onstage become increasingly surreal, as Gant faces down a small mutiny by one of his actors, the rebellious Ludd. It is Ludd who argues that plays should represent reality, whereas Gant argues for the truth of the imagination and for the truth of surreal metaphors. In a final twist, both men are proved hilariously right.
As a splash of bad taste – and the jokes are as revolting as you can ever expect to see on the British stage, –this is really great stuff, vigorously directed by Steve Marmion. In the first part of the play, Gant’s obsession with the theme of loneliness, along with his desire to talk about the dark side of the experience of love, is a clear attack on the consolations of sentimentality and mawkishness.
But, gradually, the piece morphs into a discussion of the politics of representation, and its relevance widens out. As well as emphasising the relationship of cruelty to comedy, it questions our notions of reality and prods at the boundaries between decency and disgust — and it’s also a lot of theatrical fun.
Much of this down to the actors, led by Simon Kunz as Gant, Paul Barnhill as Ludd, plus Emma Handy and Sam Cox, who play their Victorian parts with a hilarious straight faces and still have time for ironic asides. If the evening’s ending is a bit too drawn out for some tastes, you are still left with the triumphant feeling that, however imperfect, a metaphor-rich play by Neilson is worth a dozen by his Ludd-like competitors.
Aleks Sierz
