It takes chutzpah to play Edmund Kean, one of history’s greatest actors, alone, in a show of your own devising. Fortunately, Alister O’Loughlin is also blessed with great charm, versatility and eye-watering physical prowess.
He stalks, tumbles and hurls himself about the stage, with occasional recourse to a wooden trunk of props, reciting Shakespeare and sweetly recruiting audience members as support acts as he recreates scenes of Kean’s wild life. The story ends the night Kean’s legend is born: January 14 1814, when he ‘came out’ to London as an era-defining Shylock.
Miranda Henderson’s direction switches pace and tone with quicksilvered assurance, and this portrait of a lost theatrical era fizzes with energy and bravura. In the high actorly mêlée, Kean’s off-stage persona is hard to find, and it might have been wiser to sidestep the soliloquy that proves his genius.
But if the material sometimes seems familiar, O’Loughlin’s performance is astonishing and this mercurial, historically enriching fringe show, the first in the ‘Berkoff Presents’ season, veritably strong-arms its audience into submission.