Raising Kane with Orson

The Lives of Orson Welles is the subtitle of this slickly performed and highly entertaining monologue.

The plural is appropriate for a jack of all trades whose acquaintance with the truth was passing, and whose early success and twilight years of failure made true his Bard's dictum that one man in his life plays many parts.

Yet however multi-faceted Welles was, actor Christian McKay has him down to a tee. It helps that McKay is baby-faced, not what you would call svelte, and has put some practice in on curling his lip and raising his eyebrows.

But most of the illusion is in your ears. The voice is a demonically smooth baritone.

The speech has that slow, confident rhythm and the sentences are studded with pauses to draw you in ever deeper. We hear of his rapid rise to fame through War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, then of the fall, precipitated by the butchering of his masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons.

Writer Mark Jenkins has caught Welles's lofty, yet slightly laughable style, his words somehow impressive despite their half-baked, plagiarised poetry and showy classical allusion. He hints, too, at the unreliability of using a controlfreak actor as our sole witness by having Welles supposedly reminisce to camera.

However genuine the emotion seems, there is always the chance he will call "Cut" and demand a retake. There's little content here to surprise your averagely informed film lover. The narrative is strictly, rather drily, chronological, and sometimes fails to skip along as it should.

Sometimes, too, Welles's flights of poetic fancy get so convoluted we're left wondering what the original point was.Yet there are also moments of drama you would not expect from a monologue.

Welles's confrontation in a hotel lift with his model for Kane, the vengeful William Randolph Hearst, is no less chilling for the fact that McKay plays both characters.

Moving, too, is the final scene when the obese Welles dons his beard and the garb of Falstaff in a moving hymn to the good life and to time, which makes fools of us all.

Rosebud: The Lives Of Orson Welles