Writer: Vivian Allvin
Director: Nick Bagnall
Vivian Allvin’s one-woman show, Ulysses in Babel, playing at Barons Court Theatre, clearly emerges from her passion for the classics. Her text for Ulysses’ story is for the most part Tennyson’s eloquent dramatic monologue, although she also throws in a bit of Homer (in the original Greek, no less). For Allvin is nothing if not scholarly. Being a native Italian speaker means she can additionally quote from Dante’s Inferno. Dante put Ulysses in a particular circle of hell for those guilty of fraud. Why? Because of the trick he played on the Trojans with the wooden horse.
So there’s certainly lots to learn here. But Allvin also presents herself as a comedian, riffing in an impressive variety of accents on the different ways different countries express themselves in social situations. You can show up your less-than-pukka roots, she says, by calling a sofa a settee. But is this really still the case? Surely IKEA and Sofa World have ensured the ubiquity of the more U formulation? So it’s hard not to see much of this as fairly well-trodden territory, and not particularly funny. Another issue here is that Allvin favours talking directly to us, soliciting our responses to topics. One senses a certain nervous silence settling over the audience, none of us wanting to be singled out.
So the show swings between entertainment and serious extracts from literature – a burst of ‘The quality of mercy’ here and something from Primo Levi there. Allvin’s underlying message is the importance of stories as a guide to living, poems which we can turn to in our darkest hour. But to be honest, despite her stated theme of the hero’s journey (Babel seems to disappear in the mix), the show ultimately lacks coherence. It all begins to feel a little bit too like a showreel, the actor determined to give us all her greatest hits.
Reviewed on 31 August 2024
