A race against time? This champ knows the score
Asked if he’d like to say a few words after winning the World scrabble Championship, Austin Michaels thinks for a moment before replying: ‘Well, I don’t really know any.’
Which isn’t true, of course. At the time of winning, Austin knew quite a lot of words, more than 200,000 in fact. But that was then.
Now as we meet Austin it’s a different story. diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, words and thoughts are starting to fail him, to fall away, which is why, dictaphone in hand, he’s attempting to record his memories.
Or at least attempt to remember them the best he can, what with his ‘mind gone scabby’. After all, as he plaintively says: ‘What’s left of us but our memories?’
This, then, is the set-up for actor and writer dan Coyle’s fictional autobiographical one-man show. A nerdish krapp’s Last Tape with anagrams, it’s an affecting, poignant little piece. One rich in pathos as we watch Michaels struggle to get his thoughts down on tape, and witness the blurred lines, paused confusion and repetitions that signal time is against him.
Of course, shows about Alzheimer’s are nothing new at the Fringe and while Blank Tiles doesn’t quite have the heartbreaking range, say, of Pipeline Theatre’s 2015 Fringe hit spillikin, which featured a robot as an aide-memoire for a widow left on her own, there’s plenty to recommend it.
Not least Coyle, who turns in a finely tuned performance as the eccentric, jazz-loving, reclusive wordsmith who grew up playing scrabble with his beloved granny.
By necessity a pen portrait of a failing mind, the show is played out on a simple set: on one side of the stage a table filled with Austin’s medication, on the other a magnetic scrabble board on which he rearranges anagrams that help propel the story forward.
In between we get Austin’s potted history, not to mention a few word score tips thrown in for good measure. so we learn how his granny’s death spurred him on to attempt to be a scrabble champion; how he met his wife daisy over the tiles. We even get to see him briefly step out of himself and into a film noir where things go much more smoothly than real life. Well constructed, well acted and well worth seeing.
assembly george Square Studios, until aug 28