Rock

It shouldn’t work, but it does. Paris-based theatre company Atelier du Plateau’s survey of early New York punk, based on the book Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, uses just an actor and a cellist (yes, a cellist), and half of it’s in French (mostly subtitled). But there’s a compelling intensity to it all as actor Pierre Baux growls his way through memories of Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and others, with cellist Vincent Courtois scraping and plucking his instrument to create a rich soundscape of thudding basslines.

It’s a pretty bizarre show, it has to be said, but the two performers have such energy that you’re with them right from the start. Baux is a brooding presence, muttering dark stories about drug trips lasting days and casual sex in Parisian bars, or screaming his way through Allen Ginsberg’s hallucinogenic poem The Lion For Real. He’s not always easy to understand, with a thick French accent and a tendency to swallow words, but there’s a constant sense of threat in his performance that’s entirely in keeping with the show’s themes. He does come up with some light relief, though – a story about Sid Vicious and a vacuum cleaner brings more than a smile to the face, but it doesn’t disrupt Baux’s cool persona.

Some prior knowledge of the early 1970s New York music scene might help with understanding, and some of the show does admittedly come across as faintly ridiculous; it seems to take itself a bit too seriously at times. But all in all, surprisingly enjoyable.