★★★★
As we leave the Sun, the Mountain, and Me, the audience are given stickers saying “Climb your mountain and come home again”. This is the beautiful message threaded through this one man meditation on mental health.
Written and performed by Jack Fairey, the show combines three interweaving stories of climbing, reaching and falling, as an artist named Arthur struggles to finish a painting for his brother’s birthday – of a Kenyan mountain – but gets increasingly subsumed by his own passion project instead: a portrait of Icarus.
With gentle humour – the audience enjoyed a nostalgic reference to the Biff and Chip books – we gradually see Arthur’s life unravel as he becomes hyperfixated on perfecting his painting at the cost of his relationships with his girlfriend, his brother, and eventually his own health.
I’d never heard about Felice Benuzzi before but particularly enjoyed the parts of the show that revealed his story. Benuzzi was an Italian POW in the Second World War who was held in an African prison camp. He escaped in January 1943 with the ambition of climbing the 17,000-foot Mount. Kenya that loomed above the camp. This allowed for some beautiful moments of direction as Fairey made excellent use of the set, moving easels to create the confines of the camp and crawling beneath a wooden ladder with only a torch lighting the stage to show Benuzzi’s bid for freedom.
The other strand of the narrative, the tale of Icarus from Greek mythology and how he flew too close to the sun, was less engaging, perhaps as this story and metaphor is so well-trodden.
However, this remains a sincere production about an important topic, especially as male mental health still faces social stigma.
“It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing men should talk about,” Arthur says, whilst perfectly illustrating exactly why we should all be talking and reaching out to each other about this as much as possible.
The Sun, The Mountain, and Me is on at Underbelly, Cowgate until August 25th
