In the very first scene, Captain Amazing looks more like someone on drugs than a superhero. But in fact that’s precisely the point of the play, where the contrast between ambition and bravery on the one hand, and failure and frailty on the other is a central. The play starts off by following two separate storylines, or so it seems at least. Mark is an ordinary man, busy with his life in the shop and his relationship with his girlfriend. On the other hand, Captain Amazing is the classic ‘caped’ superhero, whose mission is to combat crime and fight against Evil Man. Things start to merge when Mark becomes a dad: it appears clear that for his daughter Emily he is a superhero, while for the rest of the world (his boss and his wife included), he is a bit of a failure. And even on the ‘other side’ of his life, we are shown that not even superheroes are immune to everyday problems; regardless of whether they are buying new headquarters or dealing with boring friends (such as the hilarious exchange with Batman). In the end, a conflation between the two roles occurs, showing that life is no fiction and is difficult for all of us, and real heroism lies in facing the challenges of every day with the means we have. As Mark says, everyone has to realise that their dad is not a superhero, but “that doesn’t mean he won’t be there” when we need him, in spite of all his imperfections as an ordinary human being.

The message behind the play is thus a powerful one, and we are also presented with real life issues such as divorce, firing, and illness. With some scenes more successful (and clear) than others, and with more or less rhetoric in dealing with thorny issues, the play also develops the idea of playing multiple roles in one’s life. Mark is at once sale-assistant, boyfriend, and dad. But since the play is a monologue, the actor is also girlfriend and daughter, baddy and boss. The play thus draws our attention on the fact that Mark and Captain Amazing are one and two at the same time. We are never sure whether they are the same person, because the actor plays a whole series of other characters – all of them in fact. This play is the right one with which to experiment with a monologue technique, as this allows exploring the notion of identity in a sophisticated way.

Moreover, the acting supports this choice. Andrew Dickinson proves incredibly talented, and able to credibly play three people at the same time. It takes a couple of scenes for the play to really get going, but once it does, we almost forget there’s only one actor on stage. Whether he is playing Evil Man, Batman, the wife, the curious Emily, the sick Emily, Captain Amazing, Dickinson is an amazing actor. The stage set is also appropriate. It is deliberately and unpretentiously simple: one chair, and a series of child-like projected drawings. The minimalism of cast and set does not prevent the play from working; rather, it gets the performance really take off, or rather fly – and it also teaches us to do so.

Captain Amazing runs at the BT until Saturday at 21.30.

It was a rainy Valentine’s Day and a smug coupledom seemed to be all around. Therefore it seemed rather ironic to be attending a preview for Lorca’s play Blood Wedding – a tragedy of unfulfilled love.

However, the Valentine’s buzz was immediately shaken off me as I was shown into the rehearsal room by Amelia Cherry, the producer. There were three groups forcefully acting several different scenes, some of them dancing. My immediate impression was that I was disturbing the meeting of some sort of cult.

Speaking to the director, Connie Treves, she explains to me her vision for the play. “The play is abstract enough to synthesise dance and movement, which is one of my interests, the language is lyrical and yet the plot is very simple. It’s all about heat.” She laughs, “Although we aren’t setting our production in Spain as Lorca might have imagined, I want that heat to come across instead in the acting of the movement and through the music.”

Connie calls the three groups to present the scenes they had been working on to me and the other actors. “Like show and tell!” laughs David McFarlane, the musical director. He was joking, of course, but this is somewhat how it feels. I can’t deny that the passion felt by the acting in the room is tangeable: the heat Connie speaks of is certainly coming across in the scenes I observe. They are from different areas of the play and, thus, each have a very different feel. The first I might have said was realism, the second quite physical, and the third somewhere in between. It will be interesting to see how the scenes link together within the whole play. 

Talking to Bee Liese, who plays the bride, and Josh Ames-Blackaby, who plays Leonardo, I get a sense of how they are interpreting their characters. “Leonardo is three-dimensional, but the play tests how far the audience will sympathise with him,” says Josh. “They might see his actions as purely destructive, but they might also forgive him because he is acting on love. A bit like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.” I ask Bee how she’s trying to put across her female character in relation to this – is she passive or powerful? “She’s certainly a strong character and in many ways she’s in control, although she may not say much. There’s a constant feeling that she’s being observed, and I think that’s partly what they play is about.”

I slyly ask the pair what they think of Connie’s approach: Josh has already worked with her physical style last term on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They are both fans. “She has a clear vision,” says Bee and tells me how paintings were brought to the early rehearsals which Connie asked the actors to respond to. She had them physically act out their lines rather than speak them. “It’s a really fresh approach. The fact she invites us to devise how we want the scenes to be encourages us to really engage with the play. It makes my work with Josh intimate and personal because we’ve come up with it ourselves.”

Overall, it’s great to see a student production that’s truly multi-disciplinary, outside of musical theatre. The group are full of life. Not something to miss.

Blood Wedding runs at St John’s College Auditorium from Wednesday 25th until Friday 27th February.

As everyone knows, we live in the age of mediated atrocity. Every day, in all the lurid media of modern life we grow ever more piteously accustomed to the sad arrangements, the crowds of the displaced and the dead. In the age of The Image, we need an ethics of The Image. But we don’t have an ethics of The Image. We’re not even close. We have the aesthetics, of course, but not the ethics, not yet.

Tim Crouch, like all of us, has grown up in the age of mediated atrocity. Unlike all of us, he is also a mediator of atrocity and is one of his generation’s finest. The Author, which was performed (in lieu of an more fitting word) on Thursday of 4th Week at the Michael Pilch Studio by a cast of immensely talented actors, is Crouch’s take on the ethics of The Image and of mediated atrocity. Like any work where the essential concern is ethics, it is at times heavy-handed, and only sometimes veers perilously close to the moral fable. But I have rarely seen (or read) a work that plays with these much played-with themes so intelligently and intriguingly.

The set-up is unconventional. Gone is the stage. Instead, we have four rows of audience, split down the centre, each half of two rows facing the other half. The actors – the roles – are positioned in the audience. One of the actors plays The Author, Tim Crouch. Two others, using their own names, play actors who’ve worked previously with Crouch in what emerges to have been an exceptionally harrowing play. The fourth is a theatre-goer, our closest point of reference as an audience. It is he who begins the show.

Each of the actors elaborates and comments upon the development, rehearsal and production of a play by Crouch. We learn, as their accounts turn darker, that the perverse process of this play’s production becomes abusive and exploitative. At one dreadful point, Crouch practically forces one of his actors – with the complicity of us, the audience – to play the part of a sexually abused woman whom they’ve interviewed as preparation. We are goaded on to probe a little deeper, to ask her questions. Some do. We learn also that the cast went to “The War” and witnessed “The Massacres” (always these monstrous generics) for the betterment of their art.

How do we explore the relationship and co-dependency of suffering? What are the ethics of the exploitation of real human pain for artistic gain? And, in the midst of all this, how can we jusify the complicity of an audience hungry for more as we face each other and listen to these horrors? These are old and serious questions, but they are rarely posed as intelligently and disturbingly as Crouch has done here.