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| Longley is the tall one (not horse) |
Performed by Damon Lockwood and Sam Longley
Independent Theatre Festival
Subiaco Arts Centre Studio
Until June 6
The trick with a great idea is knowing how far you can take it. In Horsehead, the writer, director and performer Damon Lockwood had the first, and gets the second, and the result is a proposition that’s impossible to resist – or words to that effect.
Lockwood’s great idea is like Tom Stoppard’s in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; take two minor characters from a great work and flesh them out, see their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene in the mighty drama sweeping past them from the inside looking out.
It’s a device that’s driven some eminent artistic ideas: it’s the theme of WH Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, and Breugal’s The Fall of Icarus that inspired it. It’s a recurring undercurrent in T.S Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
But that’s all way too hifalutin’, which is something you could never accuse Horsehead of.
