BWW Reviews: WAITING LIKE A MAN, Old Red Lion Theatre, June 29 2011

Something between a comic monologue and a stand-up routine, Waiting Like A Man (at the Old Red Lion Theatre until July 16) is also something between a murder mystery and coming of age tale. On a bare set, with only a chair, table and sparingly used computer projector for company, the show is entirely dependent on the personality of its performer - fortunately, Daniel Benoliel's gentle self-deprecatory style is ideally suited to the space and the story.

With his wife's positive pregnancy test provoking him to shed his laddish lifestyle, Benoliel explores his relationship with his recently deceased father through investigating an inexplicably inexplicable reference to a murder left on his fastidious father's hard drive. Delving 92 years into the past requires him to travel 200 miles north, where a few nights trying to get his friend's toddlers off to sleep provides him with a wake-up call to the realities that will soon confront him as a new father. Between awkward conversations with a local history obsessive, Benoliel finds out more, more than he would have liked, about the murder and his grandfather. 

Fatherhood, murder, relationships - heavy stuff eh? Well yes, but Benoliel's dry wit and winning demeanour (helped by a few good jokes) keep things light but never inconsequential. At about 45 minutes, I confess to feeling a little short-changed, because there is clearly more to say about the murder and the impending fatherhood and Benoliel could have used his gift for mimicry to adopt more than just two other personas to play off himself. I guess the mark of a good host is to leave his audience wanting more, but I'm pretty sure we'd have wanted more at the end of another 45 mins.