Minetti

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

3/5

THE Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard is little known in Britain but, since his death in 1989, he has been hailed in Europe — and even in Austria, with which he shared a mutual hatred — as a major voice.

His Minetti starts in a hotel lobby on New Year’s Eve where an elderly man with suitcase regales an impassive desk clerk, a bellboy and an increasingly inebriated middle-aged woman with an account of the reason for his visit and progressively of his life.

The visitor explains numerous times to his unresponsive audience that he is an actor, here to meet a theatre director who wishes to engage him to revive his King Lear he last played 30 years ago. His frustrated wait is punctuated by groups of hysterical revellers bursting from the hotel lift through the funereal lobby.

Minetti is both homage to one of Bernhard’s favourite actors and a reflection of the disillusionment with the way the modern world has trivialised culture. As he interweaves the history of his great acting triumphs in Lubeck and subsequent disaster with his observations on art and the actors’ role — “We always acted in spite of the audience” — the bewildering entry of unlikely hotel guests, a dwarf and a cripple among them,  dashes his hopes.

In this “portrait of the artist as an old man,” Minetti is a philosophical monologue by a modern Everyman version of King Lear where life, art, ageing and madness merge into a void of loneliness.

The play nods to the absurd worlds of Beckett and Pinter but lacks dramatic tension. We feel sure from the start that the director, unlike Godot, will not turn up. 

Yet Peter Eyre as the desolate thespian holds the audience in a gentle suspense. Will we ever see his precious Lear mask, the prop for his failing grasp on reality, created for him by the artist Ensor?

The final image as the lobby dissolves into the storm outside with the masked Minetti braving the elements — Lear at last, but on his heath — marks a kind of defiance, challenging the play’s earlier portrayal of the meaninglessness of life.

GORDON PARSONS