Daniel MacIvor’s Here Lies Henry is the other half of the pair of MacIvor one man shows currently playing at Factory Theatre.  It’s quite different from Monster.  For starters Damien Atkins plays a single character, Henry “Tom” Gallery rather than the multiple character of Monster.  The only things we know for sure about Henry is that he is a liar and he wants, for some reason, to tell us his life story, or rather several versions of it.  The only thing he says that we can be fairly sure is true is that you are born, then you do stuff and then you die.

So we don’t know if he had his dog put down to placate his allergic girlfriend, whether his mother was a nurse or a waitress, whether he persuaded Donald Trump that the election was stolen or whether he really set fire to the family home.  We can tell he’s very insecure.  His monologue with (or at) us is interrupted by frantic disco dancing, the odd cartwheel and a craving for a cigarette.  And somewhere along the line he expects to find meaning in all of this.  What do we mean by “love” or “beauty” and what, indeed, is “truth”.  Unsurprisingly Henry can’t give us answers to any of that but he is quite good at making us feel uncomfortable that we can’t either.

Damien Atkins does all this with considerable skill.  He tells cringeworthy jokes cringeworthily (over and over again).  He expresses physically a wide range of (mostly discomfiting) emotions.  He draws the audience into his process insidiously.  He doesn’t get as much help from the lighting (André du Toit) and sound (Olivia Wheeler) as Karl Ang does in Monster but where it’s deployed it’s effective.  And director Tawiah M’Carthy has found a way of keeping things going.  It doesn’t outstay its 80 minutes or so.

I don’t know how I would feel about Here Lies Henry if I hadn’t seen Monster first.  They seem to me complementary ways of examining how fucked up humans are individually and collectively which is, I suppose, one way of describing what the Athenians thought theatre was all about.

Here Lies Henry continues on the main stage at Factory Theatre until December 17th.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz