FringeReview UK 2024

Captain Amazing

Matthew Schmolle Productions

Genre: Contemporary, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre

Venue: Southwark Playhouse Little Studio, Borough

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“It’s a cape…. It’s a cape.” His style is rescuing the world. His message is grieving. Mark Weinman returns on its tenth anniversary to the role he created in Alistair McDowall’s 2014 Captain Amazing, now playing at Southwark Playhouse Little Studio, again directed by Clive Judd till May 25^th.

Acclaimed as a masterpiece it’s lost none of its power: its themes are perennial, its mode breathtakingly different. Mark, the caped character stands in an open whitish rhomboid poked with words apparating on its papered wall. There’s barely room to turn and a red chair’s often upended. So is Mark.

We know McDowall from subsequent plays like Pomona, X, The Glow, All Of It: all but the first premiered at the Royal Court. If you’ve seen any you’ll know McDowall’s world is spooked, spectral, spare, original, strange. Characters haunt themselves. And their selves haunt the last character left standing.

So it’s more than fascinating to see McDowall emerge with this early masterpiece that has its roots in his post-student days. A non-articulate man working at B&Q is somehow befriended by a shy sink-challenged woman, Jennifer we learn.

Jennifer goes home with Mark; they marry, have a daughter, Emily: each stage nudged along by hesitations. As Emily grows up and grows sicker, the marriage ends, and ultimately Mark’s on his own with Emily.

Weinman riffles through a gallimaufry of characters and each scene starts without even a beat as he launches into the three, or is it four principals? Mark is hesitant and modest; his alter-ego in alternating scenes is Captain Amazing, fighting Evil Man or bumping into Superman for a fraternal catch-up in the clouds. He’s vocally too all that Mark isn’t. Then there’s soft-voiced Jennifer and inquisitive Emily: “your good bits are from Mum” Mark once claims self-deprecatingly.

Asked what he does, Mark – self-deprecating elsewhere – reverts to a heroic inner life: “Fight… baddies and things. Save people… make people go to bed when they’re supposed to go to bed…” That slippage is telling too.

The structural brilliance of this play and its affect are a sucker-punch. At first you don’t notice the disconnect when Jennifer draws attention to Mark’s B&Q name-badge, but not his cape.

Chronology’s also skewed (as the text shows) at one or two cunning points, but mostly it’s a traversal of perhaps a decade. The sheer strangeness of Mark’s compensatory life is enshrouded by the cape he wears. It’s clear he doesn’t wear it to begin with, so what’s the shift?

This is literally a play about magical thinking, the inner world of fixing something terrible by magic. Of bargaining with the universe and flying all over it. It’s only when some people draw attention to Mark’s cape, and he acts more strangely than before in his loneliness, we begin to see why he’s worn it, how this might seem funny, but is something other.

Weinman’s Mark is a flinch of a man, full of pathos and certain he’s not good enough, even for his daughter.  Especially when he has to explain things he shouldn’t ever have to. In particular the tender interchanges with Emily are infinitely touching as well as comic, and ache with the heart of the play.

As Mark’s isolation increases and his resort to a richer life leaks into the world, consequences accrue but more importantly they reflect the unsaid, oblique devastation at the heart of Captain Amazing. The end’s seemingly in a different though magical world. Lift-off to a future McDowall.

Weinman’s so consummate and absorbed he saturates the audience with his creation, and you realise the 70 minute play’s now 60.

The creative team is award-winning too. Judd’s own debut play Here, winning the Papatango competition was staged here in November 2022. The rest of the team are new. Asaf Zobar’s sound and composition time-travels us to the sonance of McDowall’s later plays; a scoop and scrape of a disturbed, liminal world.

Georgia de Grey’s set with its white-paper minimalism (with a final reveal) suggests Mark’s strikingly sparse flat (that surprises Jennifer), is a tabula rasa for grief to write on. And it does.

Madison Coby’s graphic projections are aided by Will Monks’ superb lighting and projection as words and shapes scumble on in different colours and crowd into a palimpsest; they eventually vanish for a gout of clouds, then return. It’s a stunning fusion and should be up for an award.

Simon Stephens commented “If I could get all your numbers I would ring you all up individually and urge you to see Captain Amazing.” That can’t be improved on. It’s a must-see.

Published May 15, 2024May 15, 2024 by Simon Jenner