★★★★ - Review by The Scotsman
Integrity: it’s a tough thing to maintain at the best of times, let alone when your work is drying up, your apartment is falling apart, and your family are struggling with their medical bills. Writer and actor Frank Murdocco’s neat and punchy little thought experiment/solo show inexorably ratchets up the stakes to ask: how far would you compromise your cherished beliefs for an easy life?
And it does so very effectively, credibly (for the most part), and elegantly. Ethan is a one-man independent merch maker whose orders have slowed to barely a trickle, when he gets a call from a mystery client. Could he make and deliver a rush order of T-shirts, by the following day? You bet he could – until he’s informed what wording he’ll be printing on them.
The friction between firmly held beliefs, temptation and pragmatic reality pulses through Murdocco’s play like an exposed nerve, and his Faustian bargain demands more and more of his soul as its rewards grow ever richer. It’s pretty obvious how Murdocco has structured his ever-tenser narrative, but that’s not to say Sublimation feels calculated or formulaic.
Indeed, his Ethan is a believably rounded character whose frustrations, hopes and desires seem so persuasively commonplace that they could relate to any one of us – as Murdocco no doubt intended. As the stakes rise to their highest points, and as loyalty and self-belief come under brutal attack, narrative authenticity might give way slightly to symbolic convenience. By then, however, he and his audience are in too deep to care.
Murdocco’s is a fluid, fluent performance, striding restlessly around his messy apartment/workshop-of-a-stage; and director Noah Eisenberg keeps the pace rapid and the ideas and dilemmas flowing thick and fast.
Sublimation is a single-minded show that wastes neither a word nor a narrative twist in its unforgiving (and often darkly funny) dissection of integrity and loyalty. And despite knowing full well where this is all going, it’s hard not to wonder (and despair) at how we got there. David Kettle
