Edinburgh Fringe First-winning solo show a cleverly plotted reminiscence piece

The Duke
at the Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford Playhouse
on Thursday, September 26

Review by Jon Lewis

Life Investment

Conceived in 2013 during the civil war in Syria when refugees were fleeing in danger from Turkey to Greece, Shôn Dale-Jones’ Edinburgh Fringe First-winning solo show The Duke includes an appeal for audiences to donate to Save the Children Fund. The plight of desperate people acts as a serious frame to a comic masterpiece.

The Duke is a cleverly plotted reminiscence piece that is, as Dale-Jones says at the outset, ‘a work of fiction lying within the confines of the reality of my narrative’. It’s a play about the writing of a film that Dale-Jones’ producer wants rewritten to fit the tastes of Hollywood. Dale-Jones wants a plot where Anglesey, Dale-Jones’ home island, floats off into the Irish Sea, which is the plot of his 2007 Hoipolloi production Floating. He is given a week to make the revisions – a week when his wife Stefanie, a fellow performer with Hoipolloi, is visiting her homeland, Switzerland and his Anglesey-based mother comes for a visit, thereby reducing the time to make the changes.

It's also about a Royal Worcester porcelain figure of the Duke of Wellington that Dale-Jones’ father bought as an investment that was broken after his death by his mother. The story becomes a quest both for the meaning of the investment, specifically about the item and generally as a concept for the price refugees place for a berth on a leaky boat and for the value of both the film script and of the production that emerged from it, The Duke. Dale-Jones takes us on a surreal, perhaps true, journey to seek out a new Duke.

Each new plot development is heralded by Dale-Jones pressing on a device that links the on-table lap-top with the control desk that plays short snippets of music. These samples become amusing leitmotifs for the narrative strands. Dale-Jones draws in the audience with his scripted asides and cheeky smiles, weaving a complex pattern of interconnected developments that involve new ideas for the film script, bizarre coincidences concerning Audi TT Coupés, more porcelain figures, and Welsh characters popping up in Cambridge and elsewhere.

A life-affirming story.