THE MOTH (Elysium Theatre Company)****

 

By Dave

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--zeNIX27vo&t=6s

Available until: Unknown

There’s no official content warning on The Moth but you might want to be a bit careful. It’s a brilliant play but if you’re a big sensitive about war stories and death, you might be better off giving this one a miss. On the other hand, if you are okay with that sort of thing, I really hope you’ll give it a watch.

The Moth is a monologue, written by Paul Herzberg and directed by Jake Murray. A man, John, sits in his kitchen. A clock just over his shoulder shows the time to be just after ten past five. It’s quite dark but not too dark. It could be my device of course but some stories can be more easily told if it’s a little bit dark. Just enough to make you feel a little bit more hidden. Or maybe John has been talking for a while, working up to telling his story, his words so compelling, nobody has thought of switching the light on.

The script is a story within a story. Sometimes I’m a bit dubious about this as a story device. It can give the story a removed sort of quality and you end up wondering why they don’t cut the middle man and get the story straight from the horse’s mouth.

But in The Moth, it works. It’s one of those stories that fascinates and grips you but it’s a hard story to tell, even if there’s a part of you that wants to say it aloud so it’s not fluttering around in your head like the moth of the title. Or buzzing, like the fly that also features. The man who first told the story had never told anyone before. He couldn’t tell any of his therapists. But then he started talking to a man he met on the train.

John is the man from the train. He keeps the story inside him too but it’s not the kind of story you forget. It haunts you. One day, he decides to tell someone. It’s not clear who – he’s talking into the camera. Maybe a person is sitting there, maybe he’s on Zoom, maybe he is literally telling each person who watches. But the situation is right for him to talk, just as it was right for the person he met on the train to talk.

Paul has written the story really well. There’s a short preamble where John works up to telling his story but his words are important and they set the scene. The story itself is powerfully told, particularly one moment where John speaks as the man, moving into the first person and speaking the words that have been inside him for so long, just as the man did to him.

John is played by Victor Power in a very intense, compelling performance. Victor is very controlled but you can still sense the turmoil under the surface. A man who has had something fluttering like a moth in his mind and has now, finally, found the time to speak.

Now I’m the one with the story in my head. I don’t think I’ll tell anyone about it. I’m here to review and tell you to watch it for yourself. I have an advantage over John anyway. I know this story is fictional. It would be even more haunting if I thought it was real.

But although this is a story, versions of this story do happen and continue to happen. It’s a sobering thought.