Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Laura Campbell, Paul Duckworth, Andy Roberts.
Recorded Cast: Aiden Lee Brooks, Rosalind Henderson, Tom Galashan, David Llewelyn, Mike McCormack, Jade Thompson, Chris Hennessey, Adam Gilbert, Paula Simms, Patrick Dunn.
Freedom at any cost and the right to use your life how you see fit, two intrinsic, rightful, and powerful overtures to life that have been eradicated time and time again since the French Revolution. Before that it seems as if History allowed the common man the space to live and breathe his own, only asking occasionally to take part in war or be at the beck and call of the state. From The French Revolution onwards, the state has interfered more and more, to the point where even questions are asked about the most intimate details, perhaps even what would different about My Clockwork Heart.
Patrick Dineen’s latest offering to the people of Liverpool is one of those great plays that require much thought, almost supreme concentration on every level but seeps through the skin, like a sharpened syringe full of mercy and delivering an anti-dote to the beige and obscenely dull. My Clockwork Heart is a play that lives very much in the beauty of life but also in the grim death throws of thought that accompany it.
The Museum of Mankind is under threat of closure and in a dusty corner of a forgotten room, lays its salvation. However, for anybody who saw the terrors that the French Revolution brought to the streets, villages and cities of France, who had seen all of this through the eyes of a mechanical being for the last 240 years and had witnessed the barbarity that humanity was capable of, who would blame it for not wanting to perform, dance and write poems just to save a museum that had locked it away?
The disembodied voices of people that have wanted to own the mechanical, of those that would use it to further their own ends or be entertained by it in the privacy of their own home, rebound and reverberate round the Unity Theatre. Raised voices, voices of conspiracy and devilry, voices of anger and blackmail, all heard inside the Mechanical’s head and the eeriness continues as its searches the Paris Streets for its former home.
The biggest revelation comes as the audience are reminded just how versatile an actor Paul Duckworth is, no matter the size of the play, the venue it is in or how grand the part. For Paul Duckworth, an actor who thrilled a Unity crowd in the part of Elia Kazan in the play Waiting For Brando and who quite rightly was seen by many as the best actor of that year, again has taken a specific role on which will surely garner the same type of accolade come the end of 2015. To play a mechanical with spirit, to show the stiff and perhaps awkward movements which a clockwork representation of a person employs, but to do that with grace, a certain sense of refinement and a delicate tenderness, that takes the art of acting down a completely different and enjoyable path.
Sometimes a play does come along that requires much thought, however as My Clockwork Heart shows, it is thought that makes it completely un-missable and sitting in the realms of a different nobility.
An excellent production, one in which an hour spent becomes one of the most important hours you may spend in a theatre all year.
Ian D. Hall