MASTER OF FRINGE 2019: Underneath the Lintel a triumphant tale
Underneath the Lintel
Stage 14 (Holy Trinity Anglican Church)
A rumpled man shuffles through a dusty Dutch library. His job is to track down those “miscreants” who are late returning borrowed books. One night, a tattered tome falls through the overnight slot. The book is 113 years overdue. The librarian is thunderstruck, then intrigued, and finally becomes obsessed with the strange book. And so begins a life-changing odyssey to find out who borrowed the book and where it’s been for over a Century.
Written by playwright Glen Berger in 2001, Underneath the Lintel is presented as a kind of lecture. The librarian has a “box of scraps” he has collected on his world travels and he begins to relate his “twisty mystery of a tale.” The fellow is played by John D. Huston – complete with the ticks, starts and twitches of a middle-aged man who has avoided people all his life, and delivered with a warm Dutch accent as thick as a good Gouda cheese. The actor is a compelling storyteller, master monologist and long-time Fringe favourite. His specialty is the one-man show and it’s rather surprising that he didn’t take on this superlative, philosophically dense show before.
The dog-eared book is a Baedeker travel guide. In it, the unnamed librarian discovers a laundry ticket dated 1913. His journey of discovery takes him across the globe, and the Centuries. Slowly and believably the clues mount up and we become convinced, as he does, that he is pursuing a real man – who is still alive after all this time.
In Huston’s dexterous performance (precisely directed by R.B. Porter), we slowly begin to realize we are learning more about the librarian than his journey. The actor engages us with a sense of humour as dry, dusty and unassuming as any of the books in his library. We exult in his small discoveries. The tale he tells us is no less than the world spanning, 2,000-year-old myth of the “Wandering Jew.” Does the cursed Hebrew exist or is he merely a story to frighten the children?
In the librarian Huston creates a flesh-and-blood simple yet complex man, increasingly bedevilled by grief, anger and regret for a life that offered nothing but procedural bureaucracy and tedium. His melancholy turns to a defiance as his journey becomes one of joyous self-discovery.
As he leaves the library, he carves into his wooden desk the ringing declaration, “I was here.”
We feel his triumph.
5 out of 5
