“Comprehensively demolishing the “fourth wall”, McCarthy and the musicians demonstrated just how relevant Max’s depiction of mental torment — originally based on the trauma of soldiers in the First WorldWar — remains today. With long, furrowed vowels, and a dialogue of percussive utterances with flautist Ruth Morley, McCarthy’s performance was mesmerising, equal to the demands of shrieking noise and quotations from 18th century repertoire, including Handel’s Messiah, and disrobing from great coat to underpants along the way, before he was huckled out of the auditorium by two student policemen.
There was surely far too much good work in this staging of a fifty-year-old masterpiece for it to remain a one-off.”
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