Staging the unstageable: Stephen Oxley's loving and lovely homage to the world's first postmodern no

by EJ Martin

A nine volume 18th century autobiography of a fictional character whose story spans nearly 100 years and is widely heralded by formalists as both the world's first postmodern novel does not immediately seem like material ripe to be turned into a small-scale, 90-minute, one-man show. The seemingly impossible task of mastering the wildly unconventional chronology and sprawling, endless narrative hydra of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has deterred lesser men - but writer/performer Stephen Oxley excels in this compact and charming adaptation.

We meet our protagonist in the slightly unconventional setting of the studio space at the wonderful St James Theatre. It is a cabaret set-up, more often used for musical recitals and stand-up comedy. Although I imagined this was programmed in here as a result of a solo performance based on an obscure comic novel being deemed more 'viable' in a smaller room, Oxley and his creative team have in fact made a virtue of necessity. His Shandy is a stand-up comedian, in many ways - also an anecdotalist, an after-dinner speaker, and a sort of eccentric uncle figure. The playing area is limited, which adds an air of intimacy to Tristram's tale(s) - we feel almost as if we have retired to the parlour with a cigar to have a private audience with him. Oxley can play literally play up to the gallery in his more dramatic moments, and an identity is conferred upon the 'reverend' 'Madams' and 'Sirs' for whom Tristram's story is recounted in the novel - we need not imagine them, we can see them, sitting at the next table, drinking a sherry. Author Sterne makes his reader work hard, repeatedly drawing them into an active and participatory role, forcing them to question the veracity of Tristram's version of events, and of his often polarised and contradictory opinions. It is nice to see that translated here - Oxley's avuncular and rakish Tristram by turns seduces and cajoles his very real audience in person, which makes us ponder the nature of storytelling in a way of which Sterne would have undoubtedly approved.

Language is the life-blood of the source Tristram Shandy - our hero is a masterful wordsmith who feels that no one word will do where twenty will suffice. The novel owes a great debt to the uses, abuses, and imperfection of words, and is a very dense book about an abortive attempt to write a book. It is a work of meta-fiction, one presented in the very act of creation and change. The actual plot is rambling and piecemeal at best, characters are introduced and then never referenced again. Oxley's act of rendering these quirks performatively adds a dimension of vitality and drive that I personally find lacking in the novel. Every new and frequent tangent proves a delightful opportunity to see Oxley portray another colourful character in Tristram's life, through a seemingly inexhaustible range of comic physicalities and accents (with a little help from the occasional lace handkerchief or pipe).

There are, by necessity, a great many things that have been reduced or excised in this live version of Tristram. Many themes that become laboured in the novel - such as Tristram's obsession with the scholastic canon and the jargon he has learned from it - are here touched upon only fleetingly. There is no attempt made to dramatise fifty doggedly 'transcribed' pages of Slawkenbergius in this version, and where such references do occur, they strike me as all the richer for being used sparingly. There are, however, a few nice 'Easter eggs' included for the benefit of those who know the novel well, e.g.the pictorial interpolations in the text are charmingly referenced when the line diagrams of the story's progress are reproduced on the stage in chalk.

The joy of the Tristram story is not in the meat (there is little), but in the fat. For a deconstruction of Lockean ideas about the fallibility of language, or an exhaustive treatise about the tactics of siege warfare, or examples of Iser's notions about 'body semiotics', you will still have to turn to the source material. That's fine. You can do that. Oxley has retained the key components of what makes the world of Tristram Shandy so distinctive, and given us the very best kind of 'Shandy Lite '. Samuel Johnson famously commented, "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last". This adaptation shows why we love this oddity now as much as we did in 1759. Oxley's performance is, in Tristram's own words "a masterstroke of digressive skill" - and after all, "digressions are the very life, the very sunshine of a story". His infectious delight in the act of storytelling proves that hoary old adage that sometimes, the fun is not in the destination, but in the journey.

'Tristram Shandy - Conception, Cock and Bull' runs at the St James Theatre Studio space from June 10th - June 14th and performances start at 7:45pm.

Running time: 90 minutes, with a 15 minute interval.

To book tickets, click here.

Follow EJ on Twitter here.

#reviews