Almost unbearably personal at times, Tony Bell’s Man in the Rain is a moving one-man-show at the Jack Studio Theatre
“Don’t they have understudies?
‘Not in Doncaster'”
A founder member of the much-missed all-male Propeller Shakespeare ensemble, Tony Bell has swung very much to the other end of the scale with Man in the Rain. A solo show, it is an intensely personal piece of storytelling that tracks his oft-times troubled relationship with his mother Dorothy and his father Alan as he grew up in Nottinghamshire and then eventually left home to become an actor. Where some might turn to therapy, Bell has turned to theatre to explore the complexity of those bonds.
Using a framing device of delivering a eulogy at his father’s funeral and then flashing back to being a babe-in-arms, the show moves through vignettes of Bell’s life until we rejoin that eulogy (a beautiful rendition, whether faltering or fulsome, of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man speech). Childhood is distilled into key formative moments of discovering footballs and drums, its end marked by the casual cruelty of other kids. Falling into acting as a vocation comes as a beautiful surprise.
The core of Man in the Rain though is those parental relationships and the way in which they shaped Bell. Academics who met at Cambridge, Tony was their miracle baby but domestic reality doesn’t always seem to suit them. Alan’s work as a work-from-home research mathematician doesn’t always sit well with the desires of a young child and Dorothy’s feminist intellect chafed against the sexist restrictions of the time, leading to a volatile household. Descriptions of Alan’s coldness in the face of young Tony’s search for approval are genuinely distressing, so too the moments where Dorothy lets bracing truths slip out.
Bell gently probes into the vast generational differences at play here but with just over an hour to play with, there’s limited psychoanalysis. Rather, we discover more through the uncovering of family secrets from the past and the withholding of vital information in the present, quietly shocking moments that lead to (verbal) death by pantomime dame and lightbulb flashes of key revelation. Caroline Faber’s production creates the space for Bell to fully embody all these key characters from his life with skilful economy and effectiveness, and the sprinkling of gorgeous home video throughout, with JP Ekins’ melancholy piano playing, adds to the emotive pull.
