PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Rondo Theatre, Bath (Thur 15 Dec)

THEATRE Do you like wearing black, practising air guitar, and summoning up Satan? Do you regard Ozzy Osbourne as one of the great cultural icons of our time? No? Well, neither does your humble reviewer. Nevertheless, this doesn’t really alter the enjoyment of this one-man exploration by Eamonn Fleming of his return (in middle age) to his love of heavy metal, whose deafening rhythms and endless guitar solos enlivened his childhood.

On a stage empty of much apart from a long hair wig, some old copies of Kerrang! and the most amazingly kitsch black and white flying V guitar, Fleming looks back through the history of this most un-intellectual and much-derided of musical styles with wistful nostalgia and a sharp wit. There are delicious tales of self-conscious schoolboy Satanism, hysterical demonstrations of the endless possibilities of air guitar technique, and wry comments on the drift from would-be teenage rebel into middle-aged conformity and the dreary ordinary grind of making a living.

All this is enlivened with plenty of musical interludes which range widely beyond metal into 80s New Romantics, Stevie Wonder and many other more or less vapid pop styles - and even as far as Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner. But always there’s that flying V and the passion that music, any music, can arouse. And the endless search for the perfect power chord. Can Fleming really play that thing? Is he really a guitar god? Or just a sad, self-deluding middle-aged man? You’ll have to wait and see. (John Christopher Wood)

Copyright John Christopher Wood 2011