 | ||||||
 |
     |
  |
||||
Triumph of a Tragedy In his famous poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" WH Auden loftilyproclaimed: "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters", a sentiment that has long struck me as being as untrue as it is sententious. Never wrong? Wasn't Hieronymous Bosch just a little too turned on by the violent atrocities he imagined taking place in hell? Yet had Auden written: "About suffering they were never worng , the An cient Greeks", Id probably be nodding my head in sage agreement. Two and a half millenia ago, the great Greek dramatists seem to have left no aspect of suffering, violence or cruelty unexplored. Again and again their plays strike contemporary chords - so much so that the most powerful artistic responses to the recent war in Iraq and its chaotic aftermath have proved to be revivals of ancient Greek drama. Colin Teevan seizes on this fact in his remarkable collection of five dramatic monologues. In each, a modern man finds himself in a situation that mirrors ancient Greek myth. The writing is powerful, spare, and propelled by intermittent rhyme, and the five pieces, which have a combined running time of only 70 minutes, achieve an extraordinary cumulative impact, with the dramatic tension finally released in laughter. There are tales here based on Cronos's castration of his father Ouranos, a retelling of the Medea story in which the child-killer has become a betrayed husband, and a thrillingly dark piece about a hard IRA hitman, furious about the piece process and based on Greek hero Ajax. But you don't need to spot the classical allusions to savour these monlogues. they are taut, gripping dramas in their own right, and are performed magnificently by Greg Hicks. I have not always been kind to Hicks in the past. He has a habit of rolling language round his tongue like a fine wine, and often approaches his roles with a quivering, humourless intensity that can seem tiresomely mannered. Not here, however. In this subterranean space he offers performances of pared-down power and precision, extracting every ounce of emotion and nuance of meaning from the language without making a meal of it. It will be a longtime before I forget the tense confrontation he depicts between the IRA gunman and the weaselly politician who has come to tell him that the murderous game is finally over, or the hushed intensity with which the tortured husband describes smothering his own children. But if most of Sarah Chew's atmospherically designed production proves deep and dark, there's a wonderfully funny finale in which a pissed IRish football fan loquaciously laments Roy Keane's refusal to play in the 2002 World Cup, as if Keane were some latterday Achilles, slouching in his tent. It's an inspired way of defusing the tension and lightening the gloom of a show that combines outstanding writing with one of the most electrifying performances on the London stage. Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, Feb 4, 2006
Benedict Nightingale
Oh no, another unconventional challenge, this time five rhymed monologues involving mythic figures who have been transposed to the present. Yet Missing Persons, too, is a fine piece of work, thanks to Colin Teevan’s sinewy, punchy verse and Greg Hicks’s acting skills.
Adrian Turpin
Veronica Lee A man with a haunted look tells us in gory detail about how his abusive father took away his manhood; now he in turn (literally) emasculates the older man. It’s gripping stuff and the first of five rhyming monologues by Irish writer Colin Teevan, in which he fuses mythical tales with present-day characters, brilliantly performed by RSC stalwart Greg Hicks.
Susannah Clapp Colin Teevan’s dramatic verse is pungent. And Hicks, an actor who can flick through epochs in an instant, is equally remarkable, whether playing a male, contemporary version of Medea, or a weathered, woolly capped Roy Keane fan, furious at the absence of his hero, a ‘latterday Achilles’, from the field of battle. One moment, he looks like a gigolo, the next, a giant stick insect.
Kate Bassett Colin Teevan writes with beautiful old-school lyricism in Missing Persons: five menacing, tragic and comical monologues about contemporary heroes and antiheroes, based on Greek myths and performed with precision-tooled intensity by Greg Hicks.
Alan Chadwick Missing Persons consists of five cleverly constructed and beautifully written verse monologues from Colin Teevan. Re-imaginings and reworkings of the classics, they succeed in having one foot firmly planted in Greek tragedy while at the same time being transformed into plays for today. So, Kronos-like, a young man living in the shadow of his father dreams of castrating ‘the old bull’, Medea becomes a Fathers for Justice parable and an old IRA warrior in exile, Ajax of Amsterdam, who fought to rid the world of dinosaurs, now finds himself the dinosaur in the new peace process....... Hicks clambers over the beachcomber-hut set to give the piece the physicality and theatricality monologues can often lack..…Missing Persons plays to his strengths – command of language, heightened delivery and the ability to create a fully fleshed
Lyn Gardner
‘like a quiet lethal explosion somewhere in the very heart of you’
THE BOOK
 |
||||||
|
||||||
| ||||||
 | ||||||
“RSC stalwart Greg Hicks’s Missing Persons is an acting masterclass”
Missing Persons is published by Oberon Books. To order a copy click