By Jeff Kubik
It’s all around you, you’re drowning in it and if you were given the chance, you’d wallow in it. From Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, and for the first time in North America, it’s Filth. Adapted from the novel of the same name and performed by Tam Dean Burn, Filth is a one-man production examining issues of power, corruption and pain.
“It’s about a corrupt policeman who’s reached a real crisis point in his life,” says Burn. “His wife has left him, he’s involved in a racist murder investigation and through the course of the play his life spirals as far down as it can go.”
Faced with his own monstrous nature, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson finds a parasitic conscience in an intestinal tapeworm, a device that serves to expose the inner workings of a broken man.
“He is an absolute monster, his own worst enemy and toward the end you start to understand what he’s about and why he’s the way he is.”
As a solo show, Filth uses only impersonation to convey the play’s complement of peripheral characters. From Bruce Robertson’s expositive parasite to the characters involved in his life, the play relies entirely on Burn’s performance and his capacity to involve the audience. With the play’s weight resting entirely on a single actor, it requires an energy that often takes on a life of its own.
“It has its own momentum–once I get started it just keeps going,” says Burn. “I just have to make sure that I affect the audience without overwhelming them.”
While a solo performance may entail difficulties not found in other productions, it also affords the performer an opportunity to connect more intimately with the audience. In many ways, because the audience relates to only one character, they are more involved in the process of identification. Filth is a portrait painted with dark humour and moral undertones and its protagonist is a corrupt figure driven to the bottom; when the audience empathizes, uncomfortable questions arise.
“He is a monster and that sort of implicates the audience in the show as well. If they find what he’s saying funny, then they have to wonder about themselves and why they’re laughing at this.”
Adapted with Burn specifically in mind, the play is one in a series of collaborations between the Scottish actor and author dating back to Welsh’s first venture into theatre, Headstate. Born in Leith, the port section of Edinburgh, Tam Dean Burn is a 22-year veteran actor with credits in theatre, cinema and television. Involved with the Lysistrata Project, a worldwide theatre event organized as a protest against the American-Iraqi War, Burn’s varied repertoire also includes an enduring involvement with music; from ’80s punk rock to the Edinburgh club scene. Though involved with the 8th Annual Cleveland Performance Art Festival in Cleveland, Ohio as part of the long term James Joyce Wake Project, Burn’s work has been seen primarily in the United Kingdom. Last performed at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe festival, this production represents the first showing of this adaptation in North America.
Initially playing to only 50 seats, the show had a standard three week run in the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow. When the director of the Citizen approached Burn to perform Filth on the main stage, the production took off.
From the Citizen’s 700-seat main stage, the show has toured the United Kingdom, playing over 100 times to houses as large as 1,500. Then, with a vacant spot in One Yellow Rabbit’s schedule and aspirations to bring the show across the Atlantic, Filth’s North American premiere became a reality.
The bottom line: does a production that depends so heavily on a single actor merit your hard-earned entertainment dollars?
“All in all I’ve done it over 100 times now and I’ve never got sick of it. There’s never a night where I’m not right in it.”
I hope so, I do love my filth.
Filth runs until February 22 at the Big Secret Theatre. For information call: 264-3224.
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