The Mudman Cometh

The proverbial one-man shows are the bricks and mortar of the Fringe. From the energetic housewives to the celebrity stand-ups, Edinburgh attracts a lot of sole performers with something to say and without them the city would be a deathly quiet place. So of all the lone crusaders clamouring to be heard, why should people see the irreverant but seemingly unimaginatively titled The One Man Show?

“It’s about what the hell we’re all doing here,” explains the show’s star Nigel Barrett. “It’s about why we go to the theatre, and what’s expected from the performance.” A poignant question, which will no doubt be on the mind of many a Fringe-goer as they start to tire from all the Murdoch jokes and late-night malnutrition.

But Barrett hasn’t traditionally been so polite with his discourses. Around London, he is better known as the Mudman, a monster that spontaneously appears in the middle of a night club, breaks out into a baffling rampage for a few minutes, then disappears back into the darkness, leaving crowds to return to their business awed and discombobulated. “It had to be loud,” he reasons, puppy-like in his gentle exuberance, “short, sharp and visceral. And when it’s over, people look at each other and go 'what the hell just happened?'”

Louise Mari is Barrett’s partner in crime, a sucker for “strong images” and the eminence grise behind Mudman and now this one man show. When Barrett unsettles crowds, Mari too takes great pleasure from their reactions. They are both part of Shunt, a collective of avant-garde artists who until recently ran one of London’s most whispered about venues. Just out of London Bridge station, within audible distance of the commuters’ thundering footfall, is an unlabelled door that looks like it could be the entrance to the cleaning cupboard for the nearby Starbucks. But to those in the know, the door opened into the station’s underbelly, a vast network of Victorian railway vaults which for the best part of the last decade was Shunt’s home and the city’s most otherworldly evening destination. Amidst the endless, crumbling tunnels, performers like Barrett and Mari forced art on unsuspecting revellers night after night, relentlessly investing proceeds from the bar back into their theatre of intervention.

And so here, on a Wednesday night, people would be minding their own business having a quiet drink with friends when a painful blast of noise spoils the mood. Unannounced, the lights go down. A single spotlight isolates a hunched figure, a naked man covered in mud and plaster who, pulling on an ominous chain, gets a bucket of gore tipped on his head. Enraged, he takes the broken end of a broom and lashes at the oncoming assault of whatever the cruel world has to throw at him: salt, flour, water... And then it’s over. The lights cut, the mudman disappears back into the ether, and the evening resumes its normal course. Many are less than tickled by his whimsy, but everyone is shocked, and everyone talks about it the next day back in their waking world of laptops and water coolers.

“To put it in a very simple and old-fashioned way, The One Man Show is a deconstruction of theatre,” says Mari, who began her theatrical career writing for the Royal Court. “Our tagline is ‘an actor, an audience, a stage – what are we doing here?’ and the play is about the play itself. It’s about the fact that light can create characters out of nothing, the fact that sound can create characters out of nothing, and the audience too bring their own experience to it to create a narrative.”

And in case this metaphysical "nothing" gets a bit boring, Mari has thoughtfully punctuated the play with moments of wanton chaos that gets our character eating lemons, setting himself on fire and doing other things its long-suffering actor doesn’t want to do, all in homage to theatre. “And he could do it perfectly happily,” Mari pipes up, “but he does it so well, he does it so uncomfortably!”

“I really don’t want to do it, it’s humiliating!” protests Barrett, who earlier this year took time off disconcerting clubbers to play the role of John the Baptist in National Theatre Wales’ immensely successful The Passion. “But it’s a contract. That’s what it all comes back to. We’re all in this room together, I have a duty to entertain you, we’re all here for something. And so I have to take all my clothes off!”

“And here’s the difficulty. If you’re trying to make theatre about, say, Stalingrad, it’s not going to be easy but at least you have Stalingrad to work with. You’ve got something emotive, you’ve got something horrific, and you’ve got something historical. However you do it, the material—Stalingrad—takes care of itself. But if you want to make theatre about theatre and there’s no starting material, what do you have? Can there still be a communion?”

He notes, finally, that it has always been the audience who have given their works their titles and that the ethos is no different for The One Man Show. It becomes something only once people have experienced it, and Mudman, Fishbelly and Peg Torture all came from the chatter of audiences who had to be able to call it something when describing what they’d just seen. So whether it be Man Eats Lemon, Midnight Madness or The Mudman Cometh, there’s something in it for everyone.