Nobody does self-effacement as well as Paul Ready. The Motherland/Ann Droid actor excels at playing the kind of man who apologises for his own existence, well-meaning, but insecure – often comically so. He hesitates, smiles sheepishly, backtracks and gabbles to fill the silence. He, he, he is forever launching, launching into sentences, sentences that never get all the way to the … We get the gist.
Playwriting debut with a familiar persona
It is the same now he is making his playwriting debut with Little Animals and it works to his advantage. Performing in the round to a small audience, he gives every impression of having interrupted us in the middle of something else. We are not here, he ascertains, to remember his good friend Richard, in fact, we did not even know him, but sorry, if it is all right, he will tell us about him anyway.
Richard, it transpires, is the good guy in the story. He is the schoolboy disruptor with the courage to resist social pressure, the one who scoffed at their entitled classmate for the arrogance of writing an essay called How I Would Change the World. “We need to completely rewrite the story,” says Richard, committing his life to environmental activism in an era of global heating.
A narrator caught between reason and resistance
If Richard is the good guy, what does that make our unnamed narrator? Surely this endearing man in suit and tie, circling the room, catching us in the eye, bonding with each nervous laugh, is too reasonable to be on the wrong side. Like any of us, he recycles his waste and boycotts the correct things. He works hard, loves his family and believes in introducing daughter Ellie to the cultures of the world.
And because he is so reasonable, it makes Richard seem hysterical. His protests are surely the actions of an overgrown schoolboy, a man who knows nothing of responsibility, who is simply not realistic. Could he not have made the same modest compromises as the rest of us? Richard makes him defensive and indignant.
A captivating call to action
Directed by Caroline Steinbeis for Pentabus and Fern Culture, a company encouraging better storytelling about the climate, Ready performs in natural light with neither props nor set. In a captivating performance, his message is familiar, but his call to action no less urgent. At Traverse at Royal Lyceum Studio, Edinburgh, until 30 August.
