15/06/26

Pleasance Courtyard (Attic), Edinburgh

Published in 1939 by Nathanael West and set in LA, The Day of the Locust is widely considered to be one of the great American novels – a treatise on the insatiable hunger for fame. It was also memorably turned into a feature film by John Schlesinger in 1975. Sprawling, visceral and strangely apocalyptic, it’s an ambitious subject for a monologue and I’m intrigued to see what storyteller Calum Patrick Hughes can make of it in the claustrophobic confines of the Pleasance’s Attic. 

He manages to weave a beguiling tale with just his voice (occasionally boosted by a microphone) and atmospheric layers of sound, courtesy of an electric guitar fed through various loop and drone pedals, to create haunting soundscapes. Though he’s done a moderate amount of updating to the story – there’s mention of mobile phones at one point and also a couple of scenes where security forces have morphed into ICE agents – what’s interesting is how convincingly these elements gel with what was essentially a depiction of 1930s Hollywood. The avarice and greed remains undiminished; there’s the same propensity for people to exploit each other for personal gain.

Perhaps less successfully, Hughes has also retained the brutish sexual politics of the era in which the book was written, and I find myself wondering if those aspects too could be reappraised. Just a thought.

Hughes embodies all the familiar characters convincingly, varying his voice just enough to identify each of them in turn, and his descriptions of Hawthorn’s startling images create an atmosphere of steadily-rising tension throughout, until we are slammed headlong into the novel’s infamous climax. 

All in all, this is an experiment that has yielded a powerful and thought-provoking monologue. You don’t have to be a fan of the original – or even familiar with it – to enjoy this performance.

4 stars

Philip Caveney