KEN TOWL considers Plato, kingfishers and Ian McKellen’s balls in an hour-long Croydonites Festival performance which could never over-run
James Rowland is dead. Well, sort of.
Last hour of existence: the staging at James Rowland Dies at the End of the Show is minimalist
The end was inevitable. The digital clock at the back of the stage counted down from 60:00 and James spent his last hour telling us a story about a life, about life, at a rapid pace that mirrored his desperation to spill the beans before he spilled his life essence.
With just an hour and a couple of minutes of life remaining to him, before he set the timer, he asked us all to turn off our phones and put them away. He wanted no interruptions.
This comedy was serious stuff.
He leavened this by telling he had once berated a diabetic checking their blood sugar levels, in the quest for greater longevity. Invective against billionaires is always popular, of course, and Rowland’s observation that while “death can be an upsetting thing… our mortality is indivisible from our humanity, so all these billionaires are rendering themselves less human, if that is possible”.
A little scatty before he slipped into his very polished show, he bent down and switched on a light at the front of the stage that cast his shadow on the back wall. He saw me making a note and said that if I was a critic, he hoped I would “get the Plato reference”.
Piss-take: James Rowland never did let on who the MP was
I have had to teach some KS3 philosophy, so I was aware of Plato’s allegory of the prisoners, chained up and facing the wall of a cave where they see the shadows cast by people outside the cave. Their take on reality, based on empirical evidence – what they actually see – is a flawed one. Rowland, it appeared, was about to spend an hour getting real with us.
He had a good go. He was the master of the comedic set-up. Highly articulate, he would lull us into a false sense of profundity before whipping away any depth with a snarky coda that made laughter irresistible. That he was himself often the target of the humour added to the audience’s happy collusion with his humanity.
His wide-eyed wonderment, for example, when spotting a red kite, the bird of prey recognisible by its distinctive tail, from the family car when he was a child, back when there were only two pairs of red kites in existence in the British Isles, was brilliantly conveyed. The pay-off, casually delivered, that they were on a family visit on the continent, was cathartic.
As Rowland’s time ran out before our eyes, he mused on ageing and the fortitude of an older generation with such realism that he got me thinking about my own uncle who had had a heart attack on the beach and got on his electic bike and rode up the hill to his house so that my wife could call for a doctor because he was “feeling a bit poorly”.
My mind wandered a few times like this. Rowland’s droll observations on life were truthful, recognisible and all the more powerful for that. When he mentioned his first sighting of a certain bird, a “flash of blue and orange”, I was remembering mine before he even said the word kingfisher.
There were also moments of pure farce as, for example, Sir Ian McKellan’s testicles got unfeasibly larger with every mention (and there were several mentions).
The articulate, machine-gun delivery, weaving in and out of a long anecdote about the death of Robin Hood, continued for the whole hour, and there seemed to be so much more he could tell, but mortality had put a limit on what he could share with us.
The end: not much to mark an existence
When he said, apropos of not very much, “A sitting MP drank my piss once”, we all wanted to know more. But it looks like he will be taking that story to his metaphorical grave. Or to his next show, perhaps. Either way, catch him if you can.
Do it soon. Time is running out.
James Rowland Dies at the End of the Show is the final part of Rowland’s stage trilogy, and Friday’s staging at the Front Room in St George’s Walk was not quite the final act of this year’s Croydonites theatre festival (there’s a week of immersive performances coming up at CYTO in South Norwood at the end of the month).
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
Ken Towl – you are a star. Thanks. This is a brilliant review on what looked like a brilliant gig. In Croydon ffs! BTW, is this your real name, or one of IC’s, occasionally witty, constructs like Sandra Stead and Ken Lee?
Yes, Christopher, it is my real name. Is that your real photo?
No