PAUL McVeigh's moving, funny and superbly written one man show Big Man recalls a bit of the Bard. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare writes about the lunatic, the lover and the poet being "imagination all compact".
Well, that's certainly true in McVeigh's picture of a love affair –with emphasis on the passionate love. The opening line sets the tone. Mark, 50, a successful gay guy returning home from London, says: "He walked into the Spaniard, and I was his."
It's a great story, with such veracity it sounds almost autobiographical. Our narrator Mark has returned home from London, successful, and can't easily adjust. He confesses to a 12-year-relationship drought.
Then he meets The One and is plunged into the all-consuming, clothes-off-now excitement of a great and, yes, slightly lunatic involvement. The brain takes a holiday, yet there is poetry here too. McVeigh is a brilliant fiction and short story writer, and it shows.
But the scale and pace of this relationship make it feel potentially fragile. There is undoubted grandeur, though, in this story of a passion so all-consuming it rivals Antony and Cleopatra or Wilde and Bosie in intensity, and inevitably it affects Mark's psyche and, one feels, his soul.
Tony Flynn's nervy, impressive performance draws us deeper into the psychodrama and, at difficult times, he sits in a kind of symbolic crater in Tracey Lindsay's brilliant set. Clever lighting design suggests the highs, with electric colours illuminating lines on the stage which could be tears or veins of excitement. There is, naturally, a disco ball overhead.
What goes wrong? Something has to, or we're in sitcom territory. With a spoiler alert, I have to reveal that there is a truly moving section on the break-up which occurs, as Mark can't take the ultimate risk of trusting the Big Man. He senses he is in way too deep and keeps talking about his "self-respect".
The tears, body language, sheer depression and inability to move on are brilliantly done by Flynn, under Patrick J O'Reilly's sensitive direction. The multi-character performance works well and a tiny criticism is that maybe Flynn speeds up a little too much at times as he steps in and out of the different personas.
But it doesn't matter, as the wave of the affair washes over us. I won't reveal the end, but things turn round a bit, and this is also very well done. We get some decent music too, with a bit of Tainted Love here, an 80s dance number there.
The evening in the Naughton Studio, with the actor performing to four banks of seats, in fact reminded me of Amanda Verlaque's This Sh*t happens all the Time, and that's a big compliment.
See it, bring tissues.
:: Big Man runs at the Lyric in Belfast until November 13. Tickets and show times at lyrictheatre.co.uk
