Review: THE BARREN AUTHOR, Spiteful Puppet

The success of Baron Munchausen (and this is just your first dose of "meta" in this review) is that I genuinely had to check Wikipedia to establish whether he was factual or fictional. But, without going the full Jorge Luis Borges, given our knowledge of The Baron - he, or his shadow, has been with us all our lives in film, television and theatre and now stalking the halls of power - is he not more alive than his creator, Rudolf Erich Raspe, who has been irrefutably dead for centuries? Sheesh - next thing they'll be telling us is that Borat isn't real and Rudy Giuliani is.

Paul Birch has written a "Munchy" for our times. This Brigadier (who has something of Peter Tinniswood's Brigadier about him) video calls in tales of derring-do to an increasingly incredulous and occasionally uneasy Smith in what might or might not be Zoom 101. He's an Englishman abroad, posh (natch) and perhaps recounting the intelligence of a spy, or maybe just the ramblings of a fool. It's never easy to distinguish the valour and value from distortion and dissembling - imagine reporting back on North Korea or Iraq or Zaire back in the day. Smith seems caught between debriefing him and debunking him.

Over six half-hour episodes Richard O'Brien (yes, the Richard O'Brien) recounts the stories in his singular style - no vowel goes unelongated, nor a consonant unfruited in a tour-de-force that had me thinking of Kenneth Williams, dialled back a little of course. Sophie Aldred is his mysterious interlocutor who holds her own, but her every "Gotcha" question is returned with interest. "Come, come - I only died the once."

Director, Barnaby Eaton-Jones, maintains the pace admirably, but the form is limiting - much as I enjoy O'Brien's vocal pyrotechnics, it is pretty much all we have in the absence of visuals and (pity your reviewer dear reader), taking all six episodes at a gallop is somewhat suboptimal - I'd recommend one per lockdown Peloton session.

That said, there's plenty of genuine LOLs from obtuse observations and sparkling similes (The Brigadier also has something of PG Wodehouse's incomparable Lord Emsworth about his bumbling charm) and a pleasing contemporariness to the material that is often missing in theatre. Whether it feels more like theatre or more like an audiobook (highly successful as that format is proving to be) is in the eye (well, ear) of the beholder.

As a theatre person myself, I'd love to see The Brigadier, all angular over a leather chair at his club, wreathed in cigar smoke like a sober Rowley Birkin QC, regaling us with these tallest of stories, O'Brien's extraordinary face and frame squirmingly alive and immediate and not just in our imaginations. The laughs too would ring round a captivated house - can't help missing that unique serotonin rush.

Of course, The Brigadier's tales are absurd, surreal nonsense, untethered from the real world of 2020. I was reflecting on that as the credits were read and I clicked across a tab to CNN. I appears that Munchausenism is drowning in events, dear boy, events, The Baron's schtick fading into the background when the foreground is itself so painfully, dangerously, dispiritingly ridiculous.

As Edward Blackadder memorably remarked, "Who would have noticed another madman round here?"

The Barren Author is available to download at Spiteful Puppet.

Illustration Robert Hammond

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