First staged in
1999, Enda
Walsh’s Misterman is a
tour-de-force monologue which twists and turns, before punching us in the gut.
Directed by Kate
Gaul at the Old Fitz theatre,
it is a harrowing and entertaining play about one man’s crusade to bring God to
the townfolk of Inishfree.
The play – or
monologue, if you prefer – is the story of Thomas Magill, played with relish by
Thomas Campbell. Magill is an unstable man in his mid-thirties and, like in
Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, much of
the interactions between characters in Walsh’s play come from banks of
reel-to-reel tape recorders scattered around the set. With echoes of Beckett,
Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, and
James Joyce’s Ulysses – in that it is
one man’s journey through a town over the course of what could be a day –
Walsh’s (very) blackly comic play builds to a terrifying conclusion.
