HARRY CLARKE ★★★★
Ambassadors Theatre until May 11 Tickets: 03330 096 690
Another week, another virtuoso solo performance. US actor Billy Crudup (from The Morning Show) makes his West End stage debut in David Cale’s play about a young man who inhabits two different characters aside from his own.
Shy, introverted Midwesterner Philip Brugglestein decides at the age of eight to identify as British and adopts a posh English accent. Leaving home as a teenager, he is a counterfeit Englishman in New York, transmuting into Harry Clarke, a sexually precocious spiv who sounds like Dick Van Dyke impersonating Michael Caine.
Harry is the Hyde to Philip’s Jekyll and he proceeds to inveigle his way into the affections of Michael, scion of a wealthy family.
So far, so Ripley, with a side order of Six Degrees of Separation. Harry is a fantasist who seduces several members of Michael’s family by inventing an association with the singer
Sade. Alone on stage, Crudup plays all the characters, slipping from accent to accent and altering his body language.
With only a chair, decking and a blue sky background to frame him, Crudup is never less than engaging, even when the actual story loses traction. An appealing stage presence, he manages to be both funny, pathetic and sinister, negotiating the shifting moods with ease.
Cale’s portrait of an uncertain individual’s attempt to establish a complex identity with which to negotiate the world could be read as a metaphor for transition of another kind altogether. Then again, it might also be regarded as a satire on US gullibility as Crudup’s British accents would fool no one but his fellow countrymen.