In a rehearsal space like an ordinary community hall, seated in the round, an audience files in and waits while a fidgety, besuited man paces around them. There’s a nervous tension in the room, not least because the man pacing is actor Paul Ready, to most a definite “him off the telly” face at the Fringe. Yet he – the character Ready is playing – has something urgent to tell us too. His old friend Richard has died, and he’s here to tell us what sort of man he was.
Anyone who’s seen Ready’s memorable screen roles in the sitcoms Motherland and Ann Droid knows he can nail a certain sense of browbeaten, anxious masculinity to perfection, and that’s kind of what’s at play here, yet with a more sombre background tone. As he tells of Richard, and of their loss of touch as his friend became ever more involved in hardcore climate activism, his imagined sense of Richard’s all-encompassing climate anxiety infects him and us.
Ready’s playwriting debut is reasonably good, and sometimes amiably funny, yet it’s in the technical execution that it really excels. Directed by Caroline Steinbeis, Ready continually breaks the fourth wall as he walks the room; friends who had seen it and I speculated afterwards whether he looks every person in the eye at least once. The effect is powerfully intimate, focusing attention on his every word.
Little Animals, Traverse @ The Lyceum Studio, until 30 Aug, various times