Writers and Directors: Lewis King and Robert Thomas
The best aspect of An Evening with Gene Montague, apart from its brevity, is the set-up. The popular presenter and theatre critic Jamie Pingle has failed to turn up to his interview with theatre actor Gene Montague. The uneasy and inexperienced Aubrey has to take over. It’s an intriguing start but the rest of the play fails to make much of an impact.
As soon as Gene Montague comes on stage, we realise that he is a bad actor. Performing a monologue from the hit West End play The End of June in which he has the leading role, he is hammy and exaggerated. He’s not helped by a cumbersome and expository script.
During the awkward interview, Gene delivers two more pieces. One is a nonsense ode to love using the metaphor of a garden and the other is a complex speech from his self-penned play Sorry Son, What Did You Say? The first even includes a dance to a broadcast of Gardener’s Question Time. To anyone who’s green-fingered, the amateur gardener’s dilemma is a lot more interesting than Gene’s interpretive dance.
Of course, that’s the point but the speeches full of purple prose are just not funny or embarrassing enough. Gene is no David Brent showing off his hip-hop moves in The Office and neither he is Derek Jacobi’s outrageously awful Shakespearian actor in that episode of Frasier. For Gene to work as a character, he needs to be funnier or more epically tragic.
However, the real Gene is more interesting, and Woody Franklyn plays him with a twitchy, surly discomfort. If only we saw more of Gene the man rather than Gene the actor as promised in Aubrey’s introduction the play may have somewhere to go. Lewis King is very natural as the aloof stand-in interviewer, but it’s not clear what his role as intermediary achieves.
There’s definitely potential in this story and the end is a nicely baffling one, but at the moment An Evening with Gene Montague feels a little self-indulgent and seems more like a vehicle to show off Franklyn’s acting skills and American accents. He’s a good actor but a good actor needs a good script too.
Runs until 17 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
