Theatre This article is more than 11 years oldReviewMisterman – review
This article is more than 11 years oldNational, LondonA solo performer could easily be dwarfed by the immense Lyttleton stage, but within the first five minutes of Misterman, Cillian Murphy has dauntlessly occupied it. He darts furiously hither and thither, races to the back wall, leaps up to an overhanging platform, hurls props at the walls. He is possessed of demonic energy, yet his character, Thomas Magill, is a humble man of God. Every day Thomas steps into the world to buy his withered mother a packet of jammy dodgers, and every day encounters anew the ills of Inishfree: the selfish children, the graceless women, the immoral men with their Penthouse calendars.
"Sin has become our religion," he mourns. "Greed is our communion and evil is our good."
Misterman is at once a deadly concentration and ambitious expansion of all Enda Walsh's plays to date: a one-man show cacophonous with voices that give Thomas no peace. Some emerge from reel-to-reel tapes: this is consciously a conversation with Samuel Beckett. Some are meticulously voiced by Murphy. One, the angel Edel, is heard only by Thomas; when her voice finally breaks free, its youthful chime is a knife to the heart.
If there is a problem with the play, it is the inevitability of the narrative. But if its violence is inexorable, Murphy gives Thomas such innocence that it seems accidental. In a devastating moment, Thomas sits by his father's graveside and prattles like a child: "I really miss you, Daddy, but I'm doing my best with it." Whether Thomas has been unhinged by grief, loneliness or disappointment with the ugliness of the world around him, Walsh keeps us guessing. And Murphy, myopically fixated on the invisible characters around him yet conveying the romantic vision of a seer, keeps us mesmerised.
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