13 August 2017.
A part of me would like to structure my review of Hammerhead by Joseph Morpurgo as a fan letter to him, such are the grateful, admiring and affectionate feelings fluttering around in my heart after seeing his solo hour of character comedy. ‘Dear Joseph Morpurgo, I just want to tell you that I’m so happy that out of all the shows in Edinburgh that I had to choose from, I picked yours’, is perhaps how it would begin. But, Exeunt Reader, this review is really for you, so…[wink, blowing you a kiss].
Hammerhead takes place in the little black box of Pleasance 2, and when I walk in, a giant screen behind the stage says ‘THE END’ with blood dripping off the letters, in white on a black background. The screen would turn out to figure heavily in this lovable, intelligent and hilarious multi-media meditation on the creative process. The show is structured as a post-show Q&A with Morpurgo’s character, the writer-director-actor of the show under (fictional) discussion. He bounds onto stage, cheerful, suave, commanding, in heavy horror-esque stage make-up and torn clothing, still sweaty, breathless, made-up and costumed. He’s just finished performing his avant-garde, 9-hour re-mix of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The layers of irony and meaning in this piece are stacked, flowing and structured like a futuristic utopian travel system, including hovercraft, swirling tubes and inter-dimensional rips in the space-time continuum between Shelley’s work, the fictional 9-hour re-working of it, and the show I’m talking about. As Morpurgo’s character takes questions from both the real audience and a fictional audience chiming in via Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, etc, the themes of the show emerge: the questioning vulnerability at the heart of the creative process, the price art asks you to pay, the fears that cluster around the artist…am I making something beautiful, or monstrous? Who decides which it is, and why? And will my big brother come to see what I made?
But the way these questions are explored is to me the deeper beauty and fascination of this show: it is art talking about art, with a high-concept and comic voice, tripping lightly through time and layers of multi-media materials. Its bright pace or humour doesn’t diminish the power of the descents it makes into philosophic questions and the shadowy parts of the artist’s heart. It is like a painter brightly laughing while quickly dabbing brushstrokes onto a work that in its finished form gives you joy, but shows you sorrow, too, and makes you want to just sit in front of it for a while, thinking and feeling, and to come back to it again another day. [Grateful sigh] And… ‘Dear Joe, I really loved it. Kind regards, Joy.’
Published in Exeunt Magazine 12 August 2017
