Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Tom Stuart.
Everybody wears a mask, the camouflage of fitting in when really all that is ever desired comes in the form of standing out and having fun, even if it comes with a cost. In Tom Stuart’s dynamic play, based upon Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s book, I Am Not Myself These Days the mask of illusion is only worn to be loved and it is love of all excessive things that carries the play at the Playhouse Studio into a realm of perfectly captured hedonism and glittering prowess.
As has been seen by many over the last year or so in Liverpool and across the nation, Nick Bagnall’s eye for directing is just sublime. Whether on the grand scale that came with The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Everyman Theatre or in this, Tom Stuart’s one man tour de force, I Am Not Myself These Days, the eye for detail, the slight shift between a movement or the grand visage and lyrical alteration of a straight laced but sexually intended line, is to be added or taken away without impunity to the production, it only adds a certain taste of flavour to which only adds great weight to Mr. Bagnell’s presence.
Tom Stuart reflects and basks in this presence and it shows in the way the piece is presented as a whole, the moral obligation to add colour to a life in which many would add insult to injury is paramount and it is the portrayal of a conscious mind, the colourful meeting the beautiful that Mr. Stuart revels in complete unashamed delivery.
The life of anyone in a big city is such that they either allow themselves to be swallowed whole by the tide of the human river or they strike out in a direction that some will find unsavoury, baffling or puzzling, yet it is into those lives, the ones who add the touch of greasepaint and allow the mask to infiltrate their lives that stand out and get remembered by many, whether it is through the richness of the seemingly underworld or those who perhaps can be seen as taking risks with their lives just to feel alive, the result is the same, their light, even for a short while, resonates that little more brightly than those who fade into the downward stream.
A play of exquisite dynamic sensuality and doomed realisation that eventually all masks must be put away and the human face returned to its owner, I Am Not Myself These Days is a powerful antidote to the banal and the beige.
Ian D. Hall