The Main Takeaway: If one has a one-person show, one would be well-advised to hire someone who can act.
The Last Man
Tl; dr: With a different writer, director, composer, and actor, this might have been rather good show.
Let us begin with the good bits.
The set was genuinely excellent. The packaging boxes were a classic device deployed intelligently: their water damage in Act Two elegantly conveyed the decay of the protagonist’s mental and physical world, and the cardboard-box bed nicely reminded one of Paris Olympics 2024. I took several photographs before the show began in admiration.
The lighting, too, deserved better company: sleek LED strips that lent the space a cool, modern aesthetic.
Above all, the central idea had real promise. The play seemed to be playing, with some subtlety, with the idea of the unreliable narrator. In the end, when the protagonist’s mother, landlord, and tutor all came banging on the bunker door with zombie moans in the background, one began wondering (in a rather Sartrean fashion): was the hell a literal zombie apocalypse, or merely other people in a modern society? The open ending was a genuinely clever idea that could have led to two distinct interpretations of everything that had gone before – I suspect that was why it was a ‘cult favourite’ in Korea.
Alas, a promising idea is nothing in itself – one is reminded that a Labour government was a very promising idea just a year ago.
For the ambiguity to land, the writer needed to scatter breadcrumbs far earlier and far more deliberately. In fairness, certain details – the teddy bear’s inexplicable teleportation, the radio’s wavering between Morse code and human speech, etc – were presumably intended as exactly such breadcrumbs – yet they were so flatly delivered that they flew over the audience’s heads. The writer, however, remained the primary culprit. The narrative collapsed – if I may be forgiven for saying so – like Syngman Rhee’s army before Kim Il Sung – and there was, alas, no General MacArthur landing at Incheon to save the day. For the majority of two hours, the script preoccupied itself with explaining elementary Korean vocabulary and folk wisdom to what seemed to be an imaginary ignorant European audience and enthusing over common Korean snacks with the energy of a sponsored YouTube video. This is, at best, a failure of craft; at worst, a kind of inadvertent self-exoticisation.
On this note, the best agents for ‘culture’ in my humble opinion, are never parcels of ‘exotic words’ or recuring tropes but concrete stories and convincing characters. The Estate at the National Theatre demonstrated this beautifully: the trick is to make your characters human first, and allow everything else – nationality, background, and what-have-you – to follow. Starting from the premise that one wishes to represent a culture is always perilous because it almost always leads to characters assembled from stereotypical cultural signifiers. As this production so vividly demonstrated, Shin ramen tubs and mukbang streams are not good characterisation. Consequently, for 90% of the running time, I was oscillating between bafflement, boredom, and mild offence – until the promising idea revealed in the final moments presented a twist just interesting enough to remind me what the preceding two hours might have been. Alas, too little, too late.
The composer managed to make a bad situation worse. This was, to speak plainly, among the blandest musical scores I have encountered. Operation Mincemeat – previously my least favourite musical ever– at least had the virtue of variety. All but one song (the teddy bear one, which had some unique tenderness to it) were melodically indistinguishable and entirely unmemorable. An AI-generated musical I encountered online some months ago made a more interesting listen.
The performer, likewise, presented great difficulties. Nabi Brown is, according to her profile, a recent graduate of Trinity Laban, yet her performance in The Last Man suggested something rather earlier in the educational pipeline and invited uncomfortable questions about what exactly goes on inside this country’s conservatoires. The opening number was clearly off-pitch, and things did not substantially improve over the next two hours. The high notes were more often shouted than sung. More damaging still, the acting was consistently superficial: a great deal of movement for movement’s sake, and emotional expression that felt closer to imitation than inhabitation. The stakes, which should have been enormous (whether one accepts the zombie apocalypse or the domestic reading), were simply absent. A more experienced performer might have smuggled a measure of genuine complexity into the script, and salvaged something from its better impulses. As it stood, the immaturity of the writing and the performance simply amplified one another. Nerves on a particular night, perhaps, accounted for some of it. But one could not help but think that Brown may ultimately have been the victim of her good fortune – a solo musical with a *challenging* script is perhaps too great a challenge for anyone fresh out of conservatoire.
With All My Fondest Love
Tl;dr: The writer/actor should have deleted this from his notes app back in his second year.
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy…
This was, to speak plainly, a dysentry of words performed by a man who somehow managed to seem constantly constipated.
I confess I would not have reviewed this piece at all had The Last Man not given me something with which to compare it – for the comparison alone made the exercise feel worthwhile. Both are one-person shows suffering, fundamentally, from the absence of a compelling performer. But The Last Man had at least one idea worth excavating, whilst With All My Fondest Love had neither idea nor the promise to develop one. I remember leaving the theatre with a strange sense of relief, thinking that perhaps humanity has found in Noah Wild the last line of defence against AI replacement – for no AI could have hallucinated out a piece of text so weird, meaningless, structureless, and utterly intellectually sterile.
The conceit itself was perfectly serviceable: an alternation between the correspondence of Wild’s grandparents, Harold and Marlene, and Wild’s own romantic tribulations at university. Fine. The difficulty was that Wild appeared constitutionally unable to do anything interesting with either element by reflecting on his experiences and/or processing his emotions. His exploration of Harold and Marlene extended no further than reading their letters aloud in a variety of tones; and his reflections on his own romantic life reached no greater depth than something like: ‘I know there are many reasons to dislike me. I know I am not a ten. But I am at least a six.’
The result was a piece of writing that was deeply weird – somehow simultaneously soulless and emotionally overwrought – a combination that is technically quite difficult to achieve, yet Wild appeared to accomplish without effort. The comparison of his grandmother’s stillbirth with his own heartbreak at being left by a university partner felt, at best, a bit careless. The immediate pivot from his grandfather’s service in the British imperial army during Partition – with its imagery of real and terrible brutality vividly described to the audience – to a photograph of his grandmother sunbathing topless was actively insensitive. And the juxtaposition of his grandmother’s extramarital affair with his girlfriend leaving him to focus on her own career (what Wild described rather diminutively as ‘fancy internships’) was a gross failure of proportion. If one is to be less charitable, one might suggest that it all felt like Wild publicly used the *very* private correspondence of his late grandparents as his consolation tissue after a fairly conventional separation.
The specifically gendered texture of Wild’s self-pity was also, to put it gently, a liability. Lines which went something like: ‘You said you needed space — I’ll give you space. But don’t fucking block me’ or ‘I know you need space, but fuck it, I miss you, I love being loved by you’ sounded less like expressions of romantic anguish than posts in a manosphere forum by someone whom the Gen-Z would label ‘incel’.
There were also a myriad of minor issues with craft. Details such as Harold’s collection of women’s clothing or an aside about his own excessive chest hair were dropped so abruptly and without narrative purpose that they managed to be simultaneously conspicuous and entirely inert, disrupting the rhythm of scenes they added nothing to. But these can wait, in light of all the aforementioned problems.
On the performance, which was almost as bad as the writing, there is not a great deal one can say beyond five observations:
- Fake crying on stage is never a good idea.
- Speaking faster and louder whilst standing on a box is not, in itself, emotional intensity.
- Stop pronouncing every word that ends with an ‘ing’ with a hard g or ‘Harold’ as ‘Havald’.
- If your own photographer is asleep in the front row with several other audience members you should probably reflect.
- Please seriously consider another career.
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