I Found My Horn – The White Bear Theatre, London

Writers: Jasper Rees and Jonathan Guy Lewis

Director: Harry Burton

The one-man show is, for most actors, an ambitious challenge. It must contend with a number of obstacles which are unique to its performance: the solo actor cannot play off the performance of other cast members, nor can he be prompted by the lines of others. He must own the stage for the duration of the performance, inhabiting multiple characters (sometimes at once). Without feedback from others, rehearsals are akin to practicing a speech in a mirror.

I Found My Horn – the tale of a man who confronts the purposelessness of his midlife crisis by attempting mastery of the French horn – confronts this challenge head-on, whilst throwing in a few extra challenges just for fun. The play requires a versatile actor, who can perform for 80 minutes straight, deploy a variety of accents, and who can also play the French Horn to a high level of expertise. No small ask then.

The set is carefully pieced together to resemble an attic, with slanting wooden beams placed at an angle to evoke a dingy low ceiling at the top of a house. Constructing the atmosphere of an attic is difficult: an attic is nearly always a place of disuse and neglect, filled with forgotten items and functionless antiques. This zone of natural human chaos appears easily in normal homes, but is particularly difficult to reconstruct in a theatre-setting, because it involves creating orderly disorder. So it is to the credit of the designer and stage manager (Alex Marker and Andrew Room) that they successfully capture this chaos, with carefully placed dust sheets and apparently irrelevant objects scattered about.

This is the story of Jasper, an ageing father, who, having ambled through life achieving very little of which he can be proud (and picking up a divorce and an angry teenager along the way), decides to take up his old French horn and attempt to master it, just to prove that he can. Actor Jonathan Guy Lewis effortlessly captures the sardonic dry humour of the main character: however if he were one among a cast of many, then his performance would be decent, but nothing spectacular. Where he comes into his own is when he brings in a range of different characters, each with their own accent, mannerism, and distinct sense of character. These include Dave Lee (an old Yorkshire friend), Daniel (Jasper’s anguished son), Kelly-Ann (a fellow horn enthusiast from Atlanta Georgia), Herman Baumann, a German horn player, and of course, the voice of his personified French horn (in a Czechoslovakian accent of course).

As Lewis takes us through Jasper’s journey to mastery of a notoriously difficult musical instrument, he embodies each of these characters by visibly slouching, drawling or gesticulating, as the character requires. It’s a masterful performance, entertaining not only because of the charming plot, but also because of the audacity of watching a man rapidly switch between multiple different personas.

I Found My Horn is more than just a play: it’s a repertoire of characters; a showcase of accents and, to top it all off, it’s a horn/musical recital. At times, the plot is so eccentric that it begins to feel like an amusing collection of character impersonations, rather than the tale of Jasper Rees. But this is a pleasant chaos.

So, the question remains: what makes for a good one-man show? The answer, it would seem is that a one-man show is at its most successful when the addition of other cast members would have diluted the solo performance: it is better off alone, than in company. And this is most certainly the case here: Lewis is just fine on his own, and won’t have anyone else stealing his spotlight. Ultimately, I Found My Horn feels like having an animated friend tell you a versatile story in an intimate venue.

Runs until 11 February 2023