Even on a laptop, Scott’s raw pain demands ovation
Three Kings Old Vic: In Camera ★★★★ ★
Met with recorded applause, Andrew Scott takes a bow before an empty auditorium at the end of Three Kings; a superb new monologue – short, sharp, unsettling and upsetting – by Stephen Beresford, live-streamed for five performances by the Old Vic, the theatre’s latest pioneering bid to keep its artistic flame alive and money rolling in. There’s no one to give him a standing ovation, but at home I’m doing so, as I’m sure are many others.
Such acclaim may come as little surprise to the many fans of the Dublin-born actor, 43. The TV viewing world first made his proper acquaintance 10 years ago in Sherlock as self-possessed Moriarty.
Displaying his warmer side, he rose still further in the veneration stakes as the “Hot Priest” in Fleabag.
Scott’s residual air of reticence – somehow away from the fray even when fully at the feast – makes him relentlessly compelling in psychological terms: there’s what he’s showing you, and what he’s concealing or half-glancing at. That quicksilver quality – in which instinct runs hand in hand with technique, and spontaneity with calculation – is in transfixing evidence here.
The piece, staged by Matthew Warchus (who last worked with him here on Noël Coward’s Present
Laughter) may have a rough look to it – Scott is in grey jeans and green top – but it expertly combines two media to show Scott’s theatrical stamina and high-definition expressiveness.
Three Kings refers to a pub, or “hotel lobby” trick recalled by Scott’s protagonist, Patrick. We initially see three pound coins in a row, and the character takes us back to a moment of rare encounter between his eightyear-old self and his father. Without being heavy-handed, Scott flips between these two personae – a face of wariness but also youthful appreciation in the boy, and lordly, beady-eyed and even menacing disdain in the father, who’s like something out of Pinter.
The glowering patriarch – who hasn’t seen his lad or touched him in years – tells him that the coins must be rearranged according to a riddling set of instructions. A reward is offered if he finds the solution: “If you can solve it, then I will come back and see you one day.” From a place of quiet ecstasy the child is cast down into torment (“My belly flips over”) and successive scenes, ranging across time and place, detail the agonies of abandonment.
It could be a one-note turn of pain-on-sleeve but Scott is superb at suggesting withheld loss and affected insouciance – sometimes angrily direct in his stares but often throwing looks aside, lapsing into silence. The mood shifts as he jumps to Patrick’s adolescence, and various staging-posts in this non-relationship: a phone-call, a deathbed encounter, haunted, funny-peculiar exchanges with those who loved this criminal reprobate.
Scott’s Hamlet at the Almeida a few years ago was duly lauded but, for my money, this feels at once more finessed and rawer. The way that tears bubble up in Scott’s eyes is heartbreaking. Though easy and colloquial the writing has the intensity of a Greek drama, suggesting how damage ricochets down generations. The Old Vic’s emptiness compounds the solitude – but Lord, we need it full again. This experiment asserts even through our laptop screens theatre’s matchless ability to hold a mirror up to our complex natures.
‘It could be a one-note turn of pain-on-sleeve but Scott is superb at suggesting withheld loss and insouciance’