Underneath The Lintel

'Underneath The Lintel' is a literary and philosophical treasure hunt from acclaimed Irish playwright Glen Berger, recently tasked with penning the script for Julie Taymor's new Broadway Spider-Man musical. The play combines the wry, insatiable intellectual thirst of a Borges short story with the old-age existential insularity of 'Krapp's Last Tape', and features a bravura performance from Irish actor Philip O'Sullivan as the narrator and sole protagonist of the piece. An erudite, curious and petty Dutch librarian, O'Sullivan modulates the character's red-faced pedantry between endearing and exasperating in equal measure. But even more impressive is the well of anguish that O'Sullivan leaves concealed underneath the fussy exterior until the denouement, when it is cracked open. The librarian's final monologue on the fairness of the world, delivered whilst he paws at the disparate 'scraps' in his briefcase, fragments shored against his ruin, is quite superb, a soliloquy of fractured, Beckettian beauty, and the last word of the whole play is perfect. It reminded me of the final paragraph of Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day', one of my favourite passages in all literature, when a similarly stifled, thoughtful soul reaches a similar conclusion on the nature of happiness.

Nevertheless, this is a dense piece and can be quite hard to follow at times. There's an awful lot going on here and one can imagine it would make a cracking short story, one to mull over and re-read if necessary, but as theatre it is deceptively demanding, especially as the librarian is an impatient narrator who flies through his mental processes, often with only the most cursory of explanations. There are slight lulls every now and then, including some Dan Brown-esque didactic padding, and the librarian can be a grating presence (as beautifully as O'Sullivan plays him), but this is a deep, reflective, often humorous work with a wonderful final fifteen minutes, and the vicissitudes of the play are embodied by O'Sullivan. It is ultimately, despite frequent moments of levity (his affection for 'Les Miserables' especially), a vulnerable, achingly sad performance, but one that instils hope. Quite an achievement.

This review was originally written for the Broadway Baby on August 24^th 2010.