Showmanism review — Dickie Beau’s ingenious lip-sync show is a spellbinding tribute to theatre

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“Who’s there?” asks Dickie Beau near the beginning of his latest spellbinding show, echoing the opening words of Hamlet. It’s a question that ripples through this brilliantly intricate meditation on theatre — one of several leitmotifs that thread and twist around one another as Beau dances about the stage like some mischievous sprite.

Beau’s modus operandi is lip-syncing, which he takes to new levels as he embodies recorded interviews with such accuracy that we lose sight of who is talking. On paper, what he proposes here is a brief history of theatre — and that’s certainly how the show begins. We hear anecdotes from Ian McKellen and Fiona Shaw, who recall key moments performing The Tempest or Beckett’s Happy Days. We hear observations from luminaries on ancient Greek drama and Shakespearean stagecraft, including director Peter Sellars, voice coach Patsy Rodenburg and Greek actress Mimi Denissi.

Fascinating facts leap out: theatre was considered so essential in Ancient Greece that citizens would be paid so they could attend without losing a day’s wages; the acoustics in open-air amphitheatres were so sophisticated it was as if “a giant ear” had been carved into the hillside. But gradually this enquiry deepens and broadens into something more fundamental. Showmanism is about the role of theatre in democracy and life, and the search for authenticity.

Key to that is the importance of listening and the role of the audience, as Beau emphasises how soliloquies invite you to lean in and empathise, to play unseen confidant to whoever is on stage. McKellen’s distinctive, sonorous delivery seems first to emerge from Yorick’s skull, which sits grinning in a corner of the stage, and then from Beau’s body, as if he were possessed. Soon voices are interrogating the role of lip-syncing in drag and queer culture, the craft of impressionism — at one point we’re watching Dickie Beau as Steve Nallon as Margaret Thatcher — and the way we use masks in daily life.

Themes from Hamlet, The Tempest and Beckett swirl as Beau’s ventriloquism becomes almost a form of haunting. Meanwhile, McKellen’s account of witnessing the Oberammergau Passion Play (staged once a decade by residents of the Bavarian village) touches on the social and religious function of theatre and ritual, how artifice can reveal truth and the way great acting can achieve a fusion of performer and character.

Like all good theatre, the show — directed by Jan-Willem van den Bosch — mixes the philosophical with the playful as Beau clambers around Justin Nardella’s set dressed variously as Dionysus, an astronaut and a tragic Greek heroine. He hangs, like Ariel or Puck, from a ladder; feels his way along an invisible glass wall; or interacts with key props: the skull, a conch, a theatrical trunk, a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It’s a ridiculous, charming, deeply thoughtful and ultimately moving tribute to the ancient and ever shape-shifting nature of theatre.

★★★★☆

To July 12, hampsteadtheatre.com