Going Solo - the one-person show phenomenon
I have just been appearing in a one-person show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s been a blast. Thank you Edinburgh!
I wasn’t alone – except on stage. Each year Edinburgh is awash with solo performers. I booked to see Game of Thrones actor Ciaron Davies giving us his ‘Mr Shakespeare’ and I am heard good things about Lucy Evans’ evocation of the 1930s musical comedy star, Gertrude Lawrence. I have been to see Jeffrey Holland (of Hi-de-Hi fame) as Stan Laurel twice. It’s that good. We are just four among scores of doughty troupers strutting our stuff on our tod, and the phenomenon is not confined to Edinburgh.
2023 is turning out to be the year of the solo performance. It began with Liz Kingsman's five-star spoof of the genre, The One Woman Show, packing out the West End (where it opened just before Christmas), and reached a mid-year highpoint with Eddie/Suzy Izzard's great Great Expectations at the Garrick, while the hottest ticket of the autumn is set to be Andrew Scott's one-man Uncle Vanya. Next year, Izzard is hoping to take his solo Hamlet to New York. I have seen a couple of the rehearsals (I am a friend of the director, Selina Cadell) and it is going to be sensational.
Managements like a one-person show because the economics work out nicely. There is only one cast member to pay, but you can still charge the audience top dollar. Some actors steer clear of them because it’s lonely out there on stage on your own, but other players love them precisely because it’s all about you. When I wrote his biography, Sir John Gielgud told me had mixed feelings about his Tony-award-winning solo Shakespeare show, Ages of Man, which had its public premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 1957. ‘As a rule, I like being part of a company of actors,’ he explained. ‘With Ages of Man I missed the usual camaraderie of the theatre, but I can’t deny that receiving all the applause was gratifying. It was just for me – and Shakespeare, too, of course. We mustn’t forget the author.’
In fact, the phenomenon really began with authors. The heritage of these solo shows goes back to early Victorian times when the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens started giving public readings of their work. In 1882 the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte sent Oscar Wilde to America on a 141-date lecture tour that proved so successful that Wilde claimed he had to engage two secretaries to cope with the demand for autographs and locks of his hair. ‘Within six months,’ he said, ‘one secretary had died of writer's cramp and the other was completely bald.’
Even the great Sir Henry Irving (the first actor to be knighted, in 1895) got in on the act with a one-man play written for him by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle had wanted Irving to play Sherlock Holmes, but Irving felt the role of a ‘consulting detective’ lacked gravitas and commissioned Doyle to write a play for him about an old soldier coming back from the Napoleonic wars. In time, several actors would play Holmes alone on stage, most notably Roger Llewellyn, who, tiring of playing secondary characters with the Royal Shakespeare Company, put himself centre stage as Holmes, performing the part to acclaim over two decades and around the world. This year, there has even been a one-man Dr Watson on the Fringe.
I have been fascinated by the idea of one-person performances since I was a boy and my father told me how mesmerised he had been by seeing the Victorian actor and impressionist Bransby Williams playing a gallery of Charles Dickens’ most famous characters. In the 1960s my parents took me to see Sir Donald Wolfit giving a roaring turn recounting the death of Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist. In my twenties I knew the actor and writer Emlyn Williams who created fine shows for himself playing the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and the son of the Raj and short story writer, Saki, but who is best (and rightly) remembered for his definitive Dickens. In our time, two other Dickens’ personators stand out from the crowd: Simon Callow (also a wonderful Wilde and a stirring Shakespeare) and Gerald Dickens, an actor who manages to look like the great original (and performs with some of Dickens’ own props) because he is the great man’s great-great-grandson.
Fifty years ago, when I was starting out as a producer in my early twenties, I planned a season at the new Mayfair Theatre in London. I called it “Solo” and it was going to feature, among others, Sir Bernard Miles (as a rustic character telling tales of farming life standing by a giant cartwheel), Sir Michael Redgrave (as Hans Christian Andersen), and the comedian Cyril Fletcher as Lewis Carroll. It got no further than a provincial try-out.
When I was running the Oxford Theatre Festival in the 1970s, I persuaded the celebrated Irish actor-manager Micheal MacLiammoir (born Alfred Willmore, in Willesden, London, in 1899) to fly from Dublin to give what turned out to be his last performance of The Importance of Being Oscar. MacLiammoir could barely see (he brought a carpet with him to put on the stage so he would know where he was) and looked a bit absurd (with rouge and much mascara worn in the street and an improbable jet-black toupée) but his performance was profoundly touching and, to me, definitive. There have been other memorable solo Wildes, including Sir Donald Sinden and the Hammer Horror stalwart, Vincent Price, and doubtless there will be more. Robert Morley (who played Wilde on stage and film) told me he thought ‘every star actor wants to have his own one-man show.’ Disarmingly he said, ‘We don’t want other people cluttering up the stage and taking the attention away from us, do we? The best actors have to be egoists. Oscar was right: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”’
Five of my favourites:
Choosing my favourites is not easy. My list should include Frank Barrie as the Victorian actor, William Macready, and the late, great Alec McCowen, both for his one-man Rudyard Kipling show and for his solo recital of the Gospel According to St Mark. I would like to have seen Nicol Williamson as the American actor and roustabout, John Barrymore, but on the night I went Williamson appeared on stage only briefly to tell us he didn’t feel up to it. ‘It’s a hell of a part,’ he told us, ‘and I can’t face it this evening, so I’m going home. Sorry.’
1. Roy Dotrice as John Aubrey in Brief Lives – possibly the most successful one-man play of all time. Dotrice played the 17th century diarist around the world more than 1700 times.
2. Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. Off and on for sixty years, the American actor Hal Holbrook appeared in Mark Twain Tonight! He created the play in 1954 and was still at it at the time of Twain’s 175th birthday in 2010.
3. Miriam Margolyes as Dickens’ Women. Of all the Dickens’ shows I have seen, this remains the most memorable. Margolyes brings to life 23 of Dickens’ richest creations.
4. Eileen Atkins as Ellen Terry. When Henry Irving died, his stage partner, Ellen Terry, devised a series of lectures about Shakespeare. A hundred years later, Dame Eileen adapted the lectures to create her own mesmerising celebration of Shakespeare.
5. Ben Okri’s The Waste Land. From Edward Fox to Simon Callow, there have been fine solo T S Eliot shows, but the Nigerian-born novelist and poet Ben Okri’s wonderfully theatrical performance of The Waste Land earlier this year is the one I reckon will last longest in my memory.
After a fun (if exhausting!) four weeks in Edinburgh (a show every day, all happily sold out) I’m taking Gyles Brandreth Can’t Stop Talking on tour. Details here at www.gylesbrandreth.net/tour