24 March

James Rowland tells stories like no other. His stage at the Ustinov is a simple black box with just a portable desk on which sits a record player and a two-disc edition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which serves as the soundtrack to the show. He seemed very keen to start and kept coming onto the stage smiling at the audience. Looking like a roadie for a rock group you felt he had something he wanted to impart that was more than a mere hour’s worth of anecdote as he slid down the wall like a sullen schoolboy. Before the ‘show’ began one sensed a sort of languid impatience to tell his story, which from the off, proved inseparable from his natural ebullience such that you felt it would cause him a mishap if confined to a chair.  Once launched he seemed unsure as to where to put his feet so put them everywhere, pacing around the table and about the stage.

The story he’s come to tell is; an ode to Ode to Joy, to learning how to take one’s place in the world, to the wonders and benefits of the generation gap, to the childhood angst of being different and the old age spectre of loneliness. It is indeed a contemplation on loneliness and by way of corollary how to unlock a suffocated spirit.

It’s a story about a man’s journey to a kind of ecstasy listening to An Ode To Joy, Beethoven’s musical setting of Schiller’s poem, An die Freude, which speaks of the power of joy as a unifying emotion. (Anyone who has not seen the amazing and moving flash mob in The Spanish city of Sabadell should Google it now)

The core of the story is a childhood to adulthood journey via a friendship with an old lady, Anne, ‘a witch’ to his young eyes, who lives a solitary existence in his street in Didsbury, near Manchester. Culturally they seem worlds apart; he rarely goes to school and lives for the most part in his head, in his bed reading fantasy novels whilst for Anne even ‘Classic FM is for pop music’.

Unafraid to let a silence do its work, Rowland is a master of pace and mood as he tells how Beethoven works his magic and how contentment can emerge from the most unlikely of sources (in Anne’s garden). From the slightest of materials James Rowland spins a story of richness and tenderness about the healing power of art.

★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 25 March 2023

Photo credit: Attic Theatre