By Anne-Louise Fortune
Revenant is a one-person show that has been performed for the last few years at various fringe and small-scale theatre festivals throughout the UK and Ireland. Staged now as part of the London Lovecraft Festival at The Drayton Arms Theatre, performer Patrick O’Donnell‘s (Vikings) obvious familiarity with the material leads to a compelling and entertaining hour of superb storytelling.
O’Donnell performs numerous roles throughout the play, all of them channelled through the perspective of micro-budget film director Carter. Circumstances have conspired to place Carter into a time-sensitive situation: he has been loaned a location – an island off the coast of County Mayo in Ireland – in which to film crucial scenes for his movie, which is intended to be his career comeback after several fallow years. The catch is that he has only three days at the location, his lead actor has just received a much more attractive offer, and the location shoot can’t be rescheduled. Carter must take who he can to assume the lead role and salvation, as Carter believes it, comes in the form of Vardell.
Vardell is a character actor, as well as a great character. Channelling the spirit of Oliver Reed and Ozzy Osbourne, Vardell has already had a colourful life, although it quickly becomes apparent that some of his tales have a distinctly dark and otherworldly aspect to them. This is the first clue that Vardell is not merely the exuberant screen presence he has been portrayed as.
Matters begin to unravel as the rag-tag group of creatives makes their way to the island. Dread begins to develop as the tropes of the isolated island and the infrequent ferry service, and the cast of slightly strange locals who have a history both known and secret, forms the second act of Carter’s story. It quickly becomes apparent to the audience, although still, somehow, not to the eternally trusting Carter, that Vardell is on a mission to do far more than just appear in a movie.
O’Donnell’s delivery is magnificent, pitching the growing terror at just the right intensity to take the audience on a roller-coaster journey into a slow realisation of what Carter is embroiled in, and how truly out of his depth he is. Although not based on any specific story of Lovecraft’s, the mood of the canon is clearly threaded throughout this deliciously dark tale.
