Over two decades, the Irish actor-writer Donal O'Kelly has delivered many epic performances. More recently, these have been tales of the high seas, such as his Catalpa. Now comes this oddly charmed, musical folktale from the Turinese novelist Alessandro Baricco.
The director Leticia Agudo plays into O'Kelly's concentrated theatrical style by using nothing more than a coat and hat, some tea chests, a swinging rope and a barrel and plank. But this time, he is leavened by a five-piece jazz ensemble.
Baricco's tale is of an abandoned infant, left on an immigrant ship that steamed back into New York in 1900. A Negro sailor adopted the child, and gave him his date-name.
The boy became a permanent stowaway on the liner. But he flowered into an extraordinary pianist, inspired by the waves. He played the "regular notes" for the passengers, while down in the engine rooms he played music "that simply didn't exist before" for the grubby-faced workers.
O'Kelly frames the narration as a lost, gravel-voiced American trumpeter who befriended 1900 - intimately witnessing incidents such as his triumphant piano "duel" with the jazzman Jelly Roll Morton.
The innocent-seeming text is suffused with an almost spiritual appreciation of music. The pianist-composer Justin Carroll has elegantly scored his ensemble through illustrative ragtime and swing. When it comes to the mystic waif of 1900 at the ivories, Carroll whimsically pastiches Debussy and Satie, even Gershwin where appropriate.
Meanwhile, O'Kelly twitches between characters but ultimately settles into the rootless genius of the keyboard. O'Kelly's solidarity with the working man battles through the folk-romanticism. There is a grim determination to his performance, which makes no particular judgment on the sweetly mythic tale.
Apart from the luscious setting of the music, the production is pared back, with its oddly corrugated-aluminium, portholed wings. Sometimes, O'Kelly races through his lines, abandoning himself to the music. Yet he draws you further into the wistful tale, grabbing wisps of legend to soothe lost ancestors, forever churned into a merciless tide.
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