Sprucing up a sagging script

The rare trick of theatrical resuscitation, by which a talented actor risks his reputation and rescues a moribund text by managing to breathe life into it, was commandingly demonstrated by a barefooted Greg Hicks last night.

The nature of the solo actor's ordeal was terrifying in terms of the task imposed and stamina required: to speak for one hour 40 pages of inept, leaden-footed, occasionally comic verse and make it sing.

Sarah Chew's atmospheric production with Jack Arnold's powerful sound score certainly helped. Then with that stiff-backed, upright elegance of his, that hypnotic, incantatory voice shifting from fury to anguish in several choice accents, Hicks eloquently raised stumbling lines of bathos to genuine pathos.

The entertainment's subtitle - Four tragedies and Roy Keane - and a Greek History Professor's programme note, set the lofty scene. The Missing Persons in Colin Teevan's five monologues are obsessive, contemporary males.

Elemental confessions of hatred, revenge, violence and love, or football craziness in Roy Keane's case, are all inspired by and related to ancient Greek mythology. The analogies are mustered in an elitist yet vacuous form of transference.

Does it, for example, matter that the contemporary husband who murders his infant children after his wife deserts him for a new lover serves as a male Medea? Does it help that the Roy Keaneiad (dud joke title) stages a reprise of Achilles's sulky encounter with Agamemnon in the Iliad?

Only in the case of the fascinating psychologically-tuned first monologue, The Bill, where Teevan discovers his poetic voice, does it peripherally help to know that the contemporary male's nightmare fantasy of castrating his father derives from an ancient Greek myth. Yet in this hyper-intimate studio, Hicks magically bridges the gulf between ancient and modern.

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Missing Persons: Four Tragedies And Roy Keane