Last Updated on March 14, 2024
A darkly comic one-person show that leaves you reeling.
Harry Clarke is a one-person show arriving in London after two successful runs in the US. Billy Crudup, Emmy-nominated for his performance in The Morning Show, reprises his roles as all nineteen characters in a virtuosic and darkly comic spectacle.
Written by David Cale (The History of Kisses; We’re Only Alive for A Short Amount of Time) and directed by Leigh Silverman (Violet; Suffs), Harry Clarke follows the double life of the disturbed Philip Brugglestein, who lands himself in a spiralling set of difficulties when his alter ego, Harry Clarke, is released into the real world. It is a modern rendition of Jekyll & Hyde; as Harry Clarke grows in confidence, Philip Brugglestein shrinks into redundancy, with traumatic implications for those with whom Clarke interacts.
Billy Crudup engages the audience for the full 80 minutes, slipping in and out of different characters and accents, and summoning uproarious laughter. Harry Clarke is an intensely dark play, and Crudup makes its vulnerable and disturbing moments truly upsetting. When it is light and there are jokes to be made, Crudup plays them up superbly. So successfully, in fact, that at times it felt like the audience was laughing too much given the subject matter. There are agonising moments of sexual intimacy in which consent is at the very least ambiguous, and one is left reeling by a script that moves so rapidly and jovially on.
Intentionally, Silverman’s direction leaves no time to dwell. Cale’s writing presents two characters – Brugglestein and Clarke – and flits dizzyingly between them. For the former, we grow fond and pitiful, and by the latter, we are repulsed, and yet also – like those around him in the play – gripped. It is uncomfortable viewing, but it is meant to be.
It is not easy for Cale to get this kind of writing correct, and I’m not quite sure he does. But Harry Clarke is, perhaps as a direct result, a fascinating investigation into the dark side of the human character. Crudup is a virtuoso who, with a smile on his face, seamlessly ties the knot in your belly that tightens with every laugh.
9 March – 11 May 2024
Harry Clarke at the Ambassadors
The Ambassadors Theatre
West Street
London, WC2H 9ND
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