Alone in the wilderness

Henrietta Bredin finds out what it is that draws actors to the gruelling one-man show

Judi Dench says she’d never do it, Roy Dotrice didn’t do it for 40 years but started again in 2008, Joanna Lumley says that managing to do it while looking at her own reflection in a mirror made her feel afterwards as if she could handle pretty much anything. Let’s do it, it’s the one-man, or one-woman, show.

Stepping on to a stage or in front of the camera to perform requires a particular brand of courage but how much more focused and intense is that experience if you undergo it entirely on your own? As Michael Pennington says, ‘Let’s not forget it’s one of the most lonely things you can do in our game’ but it is nonetheless something that many actors — given the vicissitudes of their chosen career — find it useful to ‘have in their back pockets’. He first devised and performed his one-man piece about Chekhov in 1984, bringing it back on numerous occasions since, and has recently performed his solo tribute to Shakespeare, Sweet William, in London and Chicago. ‘I don’t hold any special brief for the form but there is a huge attraction in finding out more about a person, in my case writers I love and admire, and whose works I have often performed.’

There is a difference, not always easy to pin down, between a one-man show and a one-man play. As Simon Callow sees it, Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine, which he directed in the West End, ‘has only one character in it but is quite clearly a play. There’s an action, a narrative, and it builds and builds until it reaches a sort of resolution.