Birmingham Rep Door Theatre

By Richard Lutz.

It is safe to say that actor Edward Petherbridge has been around the stage for some time. He was in the original Rosencrantz and Guildenstern way back in the sixties, in Nicholas Nickleby and in many Shakespearean productions over the decades. His career is a long one.

But a long one that almost ended when he was about to step into the role of Lear while abroad. Bang. He had a stroke and was left almost incapacitated. Except he remembered every line of the Lear role he was rehearsing for.

My Perfect Mind is a two-hander that uses the metaphor of the cracked mind, the broken life, to portray not only this elderly actor’s world in the theatre but also his slow recuperation. It is not so much a narrative as a memory seen through a prism. And sometimes it is not too clear where it is going.

First of all, it only works for an audience entranced by theatre, who understands British theatre and intrigued by its main players and would love to know more about the ephemera of being a strolling player with the ups, downs and uncertainties of the job. For this type of audience it works. But for an audience expecting a simple good night out, I am not so sure.

Petherbridge does a grand job playing himself, from a mere seven year old to the slumping, self-aware geriatric stroke victim. His character is self deprecating, knowing, cheeky and many times simply witty and funny. But Petherbridge, the man in front of us on the the stage, sometimes mumbles his allusions, his asides, his anecdotes to the point of my straining to get the gist of what he is saying.

His foil, played by Paul Hunter, is multi-skilled. He is Lear’s Fool, his agent, his panto German psychiatrist, Lear’s Cordelia, Petherbridge’s silent father, and his valiant beloved mother. He fills the stage and with his rubbery comic face, easily fitting into the multi-role job he has.

My Perfect Mind is a very personal play for Petherbridge. He also wrote his autobiography about the catastrophic stroke that almost ended his career and, in some poetic way, also elongated his stage life by allowing him to be in a play about the illness that almost ended his work.

Until 8th November. Tickets: 0121 236 4455