The one and only
By Claire Prentice
Published: 10/8/2009
After seeing a string of awful one-man shows, John Clancy wrote his own – but this one is good, he tells Claire Prentice
ONE-PERSON shows are a risky kind of entertainment. Done well, they deliver theatre in its rawest form; done badly they are self-indulgent and pretentious. Which is why John Clancy deserves a medal: last year at the Fringe, the writer and artistic director set out to see as many one-person shows as was humanly possible. What could have been an excruciating experience turned out to be strangely inspirational.
“‘My Life As A Drug Addict’; ‘The Moment I Realised I was Gay’; ‘The Day I Discovered I Was A Man’; ‘My Life As An Alien’. I saw them all,” says Clancy, who is today sitting with his actress wife Nancy Walsh, having lunch in their local diner in New York. “I saw at least 50 and there were a lot of bad ones among that 50. A lot.”
Instead of putting it down to experience and vowing never to sit through another one-man show again, Clancy did what any self-respecting writer would do, and wrote one himself. The result is The Event which, according to Clancy, is the last one-man show you will ever need to see – though not, he adds, because it is more awful than all the others.
“I was in Edinburgh with another show and in my spare time I was going to all these shows. I didn’t start out thinking that it would lead to me writing something but then I started writing and The Event came out as a response to all the bad one-man shows I’ve ever seen,” says Clancy, who, with Walsh, runs the multiple Fringe First-winning Clancy Productions.
“We saw another really terrible one just the other week,” confides Walsh. So the process of writing The Event didn’t kill off the desire to see another show involving just one actor? “A close friend was performing it,” she adds with a pained expression.
Since their Fringe debut in 2000, Clancy Productions have become known to Edinburgh audiences for their high-energy, intellectually engaging theatre in shows such as Fatboy, Americana Absurdum and Horse Country. In 2007 they won the inaugural EIF Award – £10,000 to create a workshop presentation for 2008 of Captain Overlord’s Folly Or The Fool’s Revenge for the EIF’s Behind the Scenes series, which reveals the processes behind the shows.
In Edinburgh, The Event will be performed by David Calvitto, a regular Clancy collaborator and another Fringe favourite, perhaps best known for his role in Guy Masterson’s 2003 Fringe hit 12 Angry Men. The Event is running simultaneously at the New York Fringe, performed by Matt Oberg, known to Edinburgh audiences for his role in Fatboy.
Some of The Event’s themes were inspired by the paralysis Clancy felt after the death of Walsh’s sister. He says: “Part of it came out of that feeling of not knowing what to say or how to behave that you feel when you’re confronted with something you’re not prepared for, whether it’s the death of someone close to you or political upheaval or a natural disaster. That feeling that you are standing alone, not knowing what to say, and no-one else is speaking.”
But while many one-man shows deal with a life-changing event affecting the protagonist, no such happening occurs in The Event. This show is as much about the people sitting in the audience as it is about the actor on stage.
Calvitto says: “It differs from most one-man shows in that you aren’t going to hear about my sex-change or some other major event that happened to me. It has something bigger to say. And the audience and I, we’re all in it together.”
Clancy wrote the piece quickly and was, perhaps inevitably, inspired by other hugely significant events happening in wider society: the global economic meltdown, the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States and the resultant feeling of the dawning of a new era.
Though it is a weighty piece dealing with big issues, The Event is also humorous. It examines everyday conventions we regard as the norm but which, when put under the spotlight, seem ridiculous. Such as the idea of paying to sit in a darkened room and subject yourself to whatever they care to unleash on you in the name of entertainment.
Clancy says: “People have been going to the theatre for centuries but when you think about it, the theatre depends on all these conventions that are actually very strange. The audience accepts their role – that they will pay money and sit in the dark, trying to figure out what is going on and occasionally checking their watch. The actor stands on this spot they’ve been told to stand on and says these lines he’s been told to say.”
The show also looks at the way people communicate in this age of texting, Facebook, BlackBerrys, Skype, e-mail and instant messaging, which give us the impression we are more connected to friends, family and workmates than before but actually reduce the time we spend with other people face-to-face.
Clancy is the first to admit that all this sounds as if it has the makings of a pretentious and tedious night at the theatre. But in his skilled hands it becomes a rather more enjoyable prospect.
And Calvitto engages directly with the audience as an actor, making clear that he is going through the motions of reading a memorised script. Clancy says: “When an actor comes out and says, ‘I’ve been given these words, they are not my own words,’ you begin to develop an empathy for the performer. They become more real and vulnerable in a sense.”
He compares this to the way we all discuss the day’s news through the prism of whichever media we consume: “I think of myself as being politically informed and able to converse on a wide range of subjects, but the views I am expressing mostly come from what I hear on [TV channel] MSNBC. I have my memorised lines and I will say them and then ad-lib a bit. I see them as my views but essentially the views I am expressing have come from another source.”
The piece continues Clancy’s preoccupation with chipping away at the artifice of theatre in an effort to present something real and genuinely revealing. “It stays very focused on the act of theatre but it is very different from the overtly political, angry stuff we’ve done in the last five or six years,” he says.
Calvitto relishes the prospect of the success or otherwise of The Event resting squarely on his shoulders. He concludes: “One-man shows do have the trap that when they’re bad they can seem tremendously self-indulgent. But, trust me, this one is very, very funny.”
The Event is at Assembly @ George Street, until 31 August, 1:10pm.
