Writer: Benedict Esdale
Benedict Esdale’s one-man show starts like an audition tape with a seemingly random selection of characters, all with different accents and physical characteristics. The first is Dexter, a squinting hand-wringing mole-like man, who speaks like an old-fashioned schoolmaster waffling on about nothing. And then there are two lads, a shouty bully and his lackey who hangs his arms like a primate. The cast is completed by someone with a French accent, a teacher perhaps. It’s a Friday and the scenario could be a boy leaving his boarding school, which he hates, for the weekend.
In fact, Herman isn’t a boy at all, but an older man leaving work at the end of the week. He despises the farewell of “See you on Monday”. He does a job that he doesn’t particularly like, on the logistics side in a company that supplies mechanical diggers. He provides lots of details about these machines; too many details and like Dexter’s opening speech, this early monologue could do with some editing.
Slowly a story begins to form. Awkward Herman isn’t popular at work. Indeed, he’s never been popular as demonstrated by his eighth birthday party when none of the invitees turned up. He keeps his head down in the office and wonders if every weekend will be the one he kills himself. But, fortunately, Scottish Helena asks him for a drink on Saturday night.
It’s not an instant remedy, however, as a few days later Herman wakes up as a snail. Any echoes of Metamorphosis are quickly cast away when Herman starts, quite literally, breaking out of his shell, finding that his work colleagues aren’t as bad as he thought. Making friends is a two-way street, he discovers.
Esdale never makes it clear what exactly Herman is wearing when he goes to work as the mollusc. Is the audience to think that he’s wearing fancy dress or is the outfit based on a knapsack as otherwise the title of the play is never explained. Without further clues, the snail metaphor is an absurdist touch that doesn’t quite work.
If the play struggles as a comedy, it succeeds in being a tale of loneliness and when the narrative gains more importance than the characters within it, Herman’s story is a poignant one. If Esdale, the writer of the confusing Snakes and Ladders Is A Losing Game which played earlier in Camden Fringe, could prioritise the action over his, admittedly sharp characterisations, he may have a winner.
Reviewed on 18 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
