Title and Deed

Barnstorm Theatre

In his work with Gare St Lazare Players, actor Conor Lovett has carved out a niche for himself as a type of Everyman figure. Whether he is starring solo in a Beckett play or an adaptation of Moby Dick,he brings a natural, conversational ease to his performances, which are best described as "anti-theatrical". This is the type of theatre that strives for the intimacy of conversation, and, as such, well-rehearsed speeches have the quality of the improvised confessional; full of the pauses and hesitancies of casual human speech.

Title and Deedhas been written especially for the actor by American playwright Will Eno, and this enhances the personal quality that Lovett crafts from his performances even further.

Directed here by long-time collaborator Judy Hegarty Lovett, he saunters on to the stage in jeans and a cable-knit jumper. He addresses the audience directly, invoking our complicity in the theatrical act. Indeed, the success of Lovett's performance in Title and Deedseems dependent on the audience's ability to feed this energy back to him; to maintain eye-contact or silently respond to his bemused questions. When a member of the audience laughs, Lovett pauses and seeks the laugher out; in acknowledgement, perhaps, or maybe just to reassure himself that someone was listening, someone laughed, after all.

Eno's play, however, over-indulges the anti-dramatic nature of Lovett's talents. The script resolutely eschews concrete details to give us a deliberately nameless and placeless character, one who circles half-truths and trivial memories rather than ultimately revealing himself. The ghost of Beckett haunts the play's obsession with abstract existential issues and physical appetites, and yet the sly, wry smile with which Lovett delivers Eno's many laconic one-liners (the character has "one foot in the grave, the other in my mouth") suggests some trickery behind Title and Deedwhich is never unveiled to the audience. "Words are fine," Lovett repeats several times throughout the 75-minute performance, "they get the job done"; except, of course, when they don't.