Up at the Assembly Rooms, New York and Edinburgh Fringe star John Clancy responds to troubled times with an extraordinary tour-de-force in the shape of The Event, a one-hour solo show about theatre, performed by Clancy’s old friend and collaborator David Calvitto, that transcends and transforms this most irritating of genres in at least two ways.
First, its observations on theatre itself are so lethally accurate and funny that it’s difficult to resist them – Clancy sees his chosen art form steadily, and sees it whole, as it flickers away in a curious corner of our vast electronic entertainment culture.
But secondly, within ten minutes of the show’s start, Clancy has begun the task of transforming his lone actor in the spotlight into a haunting everyman hero for our times; a man unsure of his own authenticity, haunted by the ageing muscular memory of a time when phones had to be dialled and typewriter keys struck with force, and bewildered and “unmoored” by the collapse of the grand narratives of hope and progress that once used to sustain his performance.
The brilliant Calvitto, never better than in this hugely demanding show, gazes out at the audience, asking if we, too, despite everything, sometimes catch a sense of shape or meaning or coherence beneath all the apparent chaos. But we remain silent, because – as Clancy and Calvitto point out – that is what the convention of the event demands.
