Up to Now

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It is a longstanding concern of mine that in some nightmarish dystopian future, our only cultural output will consist entirely of unnecessary biopics of minor Bohemian-era artists; a world in which uninspired thespian-types convey in shorthand to one another how very cultured they are, to the great indifference of the public at large. One fears that Up to Now, a biographical play about the life of the little-known composer Martin Shaw, is a part of this navel-gazing vanguard.

It is really very difficult to understand the point of this show. Shaw’s life, as depicted in Up to Now, is little more than a bland repetition of a lacklustre formula: Shaw travels to a new city, floridly describes some buildings, tells a dull, suitably bourgeois anecdote, then moves on. The script is over-written and a chore to follow; a problem exacerbated by the fact that Up to Now is a monologue that’s not so much performed as recited by Mark Ross – whose drama-school over-pronunciation and lack of engagement harks back to a time when method-acting was but a twinkle in Lee Strasberg’s eye.

Ultimately, this is precisely the kind of thing that puts many people off the very idea of theatre: deadly boring and so thoroughly lacking in dynamism or any particular point that it barely qualifies as entertainment.