A Slight Ache: Achingly Hip

How would you react if you spotted a dishevelled Simon Munnery mooching around your property. Call the authorities? Commend him on a long and consistently groundbreaking career in the comedy business? Or become unnaturally obsessed?

That’s the conundrum posed by Harold Pinter’s lesser-spotted radio play A Slight Ache or, at least, by Thom Tuck’s latest attempt to raise its profile.

Tuck's an old hand at the Fringe, having performed as one third of the Penny Dreadfuls for several years and undertaken numerous acclaimed acting/directing roles. Is he a particularly keen Pinter punter? “Massive. The very first thing I bought with my very first student loan cheque when I arrived at the University of Edinburgh was a Complete Pinter," he admits, "and after that, paid my rent." He first staged the 1958 tragicomedy at university, aeons ago.

A Slight Ache is a psychological tale about a reasonably well-to-do couple—played here by Tuck and the experienced Catriona Knox, of the Boom Jennies—and an aging vagrant whose presence prises open the cracks in their marriage and mindsets.

That interloper is Simon Munnery’s first role in an Edinburgh play for over a decade, and the mischievous might attempt certain parallels: he too is a slightly mythical figure, whose reappearance at The Stand every August inspires wonder, bewilderment and probably a degree of soul searching among less ambitious comics.

Then again, this appealing collision of man and part might never have happened. Tuck initially looked to cast Munnery in Pinter’s The Caretaker, “but you can’t get the rights to do it if you’re going to make any cuts. And there’s no way you can fit it into an hour, and there’s nowhere to put it on longer than an hour. So I went back through my Complete Pinter.”

Discussions about A Slight Ache got off to a dubious start: “He said ‘Which one do you want me for?’ ‘The old man, Simon.’ ‘Oh, it’s come to that has it?’”

In other versions the vagrant doesn’t appear at all, and critics of previous live performances have bemoaned the lack of mystery. It was, after all, intended for radio. Has Tuck heard the original production? “Not really interested in it,” he insists. “The bits toward the end of the play that are very difficult and challenging as an actor – and hopefully for an audience. I don’t want to find out what the answers to those questions were.”

Not that Tuck is actually directing this version, we should add. For an ‘outside eye’ he brought in James Yeatman, best known for successfully heading up several Fringe productions for Kandinsky (“He’s a friend, and would do it for that money.”). So Tuck’s role is a bit like when Tom Cruise buys the rights to a novel, then hires someone else to film him in it?

“That’s essentially it,” he concludes. “I’m the Tom Cruise of a 55-seater at The Pleasance.”