HERE LIES HENRY – REVIEW OF DANIEL MacIVOR’S PLAY AT FACTORY THEATRE

Reviewed James Karas

Here Lies Henry is a one-actor play that covers a wide range of matters. At 80-minutes it looks like murder for the actor but Damien Atkins performs it like the seasoned professional that he is. His character Henry goes  from an awkward beginning to a boisterous middle and wordy end, enough to test the mettle of any actor. Atkins performs with aplomb and no sign of fatigue or faltering. Kudos for his performance.

I am not sure I would give the same high marks to the play. If there is a structure to what Henry, the character in the play is addressing, it was not apparent and I must admit that I found myself mentally wandering away from what was happening on the stage.

Atkins as Henry enters barefoot wearing a black suit, black tie and a white shirt. The stage is dark except for a column of bright light behind him. He speaks haltingly almost as if he has a speech impediment and stays on the same spot for some time. Henry tries to ingratiate himself with the audience by telling a couple of jokes  and relates some incidents badly and incoherently. He hits the spot only when he tells us about going to a symposium of vegetarians where there was an all-you-can-eat salad bar. The punch line is that no wonder vegetarians don’t eat pigs, they are pigs. A good line that got a big laugh but it was one of the few.

Henry gives us some personal information, quotes Nietzsche and continues talking haltingly about lying and his parents. He describes at some length the types of lies that there are, the stages of growing up and gives a funny recapitulation of Genesis and the curt observation that Eve was created from a rib. Do you want fries with that rib?     

Damien Atkins in Here Lies Henry. Photo: Dahlia Katz

His speech becomes assured, he does some dance steps, gets closer to the audience and engages members including getting a cigarette and a lighter from one attendee. His engaging the audience may not have been very successful because of the small number of people in the audience.  I did not count them but there could not have been many more than thirty people in attendance. That can be murder for the actor that tries to develop a rapport with them. Atkins kept soldiering on, to his credit.

Henry talks about himself and his parents again and the prose gets weaker and one’s attention span shorter. Heny tries to tell us about love but he gets repetitive, uncertain, faltering, uninteresting.

Henry seems to have run out of steam and he tells us that he became a commercial pilot but could not fly because he was too tall. And something about Noah’s Ark. More about his parents and about himself as a liar and so it ends. 

There are some flashes of lights and some thunderclaps and Henry does move around in the latter half of the monologue. The stage is empty except for a chair that Henry brings to the stage from the front of the theatre but unfortunately, I could not find enough salad to make a pig of myself or, not being a vegetarian, enough meat to satiate my theatrical hunger.

Director Tawiah M’Carthy does a good job directing but, in the end, there may have been only so much that he could do with the script.
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Here Lies Henry by Daniel MacIvor directed by  Tawiah M’Carthy continues until December 17, 2023, at the Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario. www.factorytheatre.ca/