Performing a monologue is a bit like tightrope walking without a safety net. You’re on your own, the sole focus of attention, and reliant on your gifts and wits with no-one there to catch you if you stumble.
Admittedly, you aren’t generally one slip away from tumbling terminally to a bone-cracking landing on the sawdust covered ring many metres below. That’s uncommon even in the most avant-garde forms of monologue. Thora Hird famously didn’t perform Alan Bennett’s “A Cream Cracker under the Seatee” on high wire. That’s where the metaphor falls down (rather like Hird’s character has in ‘A Cream Cracker under the Sofa’).
But there is a tightrope-like tension and immediacy to a good monologue. And a good monologue is a great thing. And lots of monologues, all together on one evening, are an even greater thing.
Which brings us to “Solo” an evening of contemporary monologues – both traditional and experimental. The carte de soir featured a giddy mixture of live mono-dramas, readings and poetry as well as short dramatic films and video presentation. We, the audience, truly didn’t know what we were going to see and/or hear from one moment to the next. Each chapter of the evening promised new adventure.
The material presented was as varied as the medium. We experienced an author reading from his own novel, poets with verse both fixed and free, excerpts from established contemporary theatre and bleeding edge dramatic works on their first outing and even an adaption of a letter pulled from an anonymous soldier’s hand on a World War One battlefield.
And the diversity of form and content was matched by the range of characters on parade. A varied ensemble of performers, from seasoned professionals to up-and-coming young talent, presented the inner musings of a host of souls:
We met – for example – an extreme environmentalist chugger, an abandoned Muse adrift in her dressing room, an aspiring adolescent superhero, a disenfranchised middle-sibling and a self-centred speed-dater meeting her Karmic destiny in the dark.
Frankly I found the whole show an exhilarating and encouraging experience and left the Shoebox Theatre with a huge smile on my face. I was heartened by the abundance of talent on show; 18 tightrope acts for the price of one. What I saw augers well for the future of the Arts in Swindon. It augers very well indeed.
