Man of Valour

From August 2011

Virtuosic, magnificent, brilliant, enthralling, powerful: all words used by reviewers to describe Dublin theatre company The Corn Exchange.

And after watching their latest production Man of Valour I cannot but disagree. Paul Reid plays disaffected office worker Farrell Blinks. He passes his days at his desk & at home in a fantasy world but after the arrival of a mysterious package his imagined demons begin to seem frighteningly real. Think Reggie Perrin on amphetamines.

Reid does all this through mime and although he speaks very few words he provides a soundtrack of vocal ticks to imitate doorbells, computers, trains, guns to name but a few. His acting is so convincing that at one point when he looked up at the ceiling towards an imagined drip of water I found myself following his gaze; surely Traverse 1 can't be leaking?

Reid is the only actor on stage but this is not a one man production. The combination of lighting (Aedín Cosgrove) & sound (Denis Clohessy) makes this more like one of Alfred Hitchcock's films - The Trouble with Farrell, perhaps - than a theatre production, which is some achievement.

10 out of 10 to all concerned.

Man of Valour, Traverse Theatre, until 14th August