Theatre review: Captain Amazing

Captain Amazing dates from ten years ago, so it's just before playwright Alistair McDowell was a big enough name to get the budget for eldritch abominations, deep space mysteries and time-travelling mythical figures. But while it's a monologue dealing with very down-to-earth causes for joy and despair, it's still couched in terms of an SF world - in this case that of comic-book superheroes. Mark Weinman appears in jeans and a T-shirt, along with a long red cape as he takes us through a decade or so of the life of a man, also called Mark, who's been drunkenly pestering people in a club, insisting he's the titular hero. What led him to this point begins at his job in B&Q, helping a customer who will eventually become his wife. Sooner than they might have expected they become parents, and Mark is a devoted dad although not necessarily one who feels he knows what he's doing - especially once the marriage starts to break down.

But this is far from the darkest place the play will take us into, and we're in firmly tragicomic territory as Mark suffers a devastating loss, but deals with it by continuing to make up the superhero adventures he and his daughter used to invent together.

It's certainly tricky territory to navigate, but Weinman and director Clive Judd are up to the challenge of the tonal differences McDowall has given them to play with. They're helped by the playful animations that Will Monks projects onto Georgia De Grey's papier-mâché set, creating a world that seems to exist inside a child's mind, while regularly being put through the filter of an adult's point of view: Whether that be a comic diversion into how the other superheroes would actually feel about Batman's superpower being money, or the performance clueing us into the fact that we're actually inside someone's mental breakdown.

Because apart from the bereavement that's caused it, there's the gradual realisation that Mark's withdrawal into the Captain Amazing character is more complete than it initially appeared, and that McDowall is unlikely to neatly tie it up for us. It adds an element almost of creeping horror to a play that already juggles the disparate elements of comic silliness and intensely personal tragedy; McDowall and Weinman are so successful at pulling this off that you forget how audacious a mix that actually is.

Captain Amazing by Alistair McDowall is booking until the 25th of May at Southwark Playhouse's Little Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ali Wright.