Colossal

It’s easier to tell a story of meet cutes than break ups, of moments rather than day-to-day life spent together. At least that’s what Dan (Patrick McPherson), an affable twenty-something graduate, thinks as he tries to untie the love-knots of his past ahead of a first date tonight, which, as it happens, starts in 40 minutes after the show. 

As the clock starts ticking, the rhythm of the music takes over. Colossal, a well-observed one-man show about the promise of love, is less about the beginnings and endings of relationships than the confusing middle in which we perpetually find ourselves. We say we’re either in love or out of it, but Dan isn’t interested in binaries. He dates men and women, and his fragmented ‘highlights reel’ of lovers past is a heady mix of monologue, spoken word, gig theatre, dance and sketch comedy. 

The title is deliberately misleading. Like Dan’s own sense of proportion, the play inflates details from memory and sweeps us off our feet. After all, it’s difficult to judge the scale of one’s own problems when we’re young and headlong. Less than colossal, too, the empty stage with a single flickering light overhead suggests a sparser, meaner reality. But the show revels - and encourages us to revel - in the way we build up ourselves and those around us. There’s some lovely sleight of hand in the writing, which sometimes loses its way amongst the crowd of ideas and competing metaphors that struggle for our attention. We flit from owls in London to a gloriously erotic ‘meet the parents’ dance montage, as the fragmented make-up of the show never leaves us idle for long.

McPherson is an ambitious, versatile actor and storyteller. He pulls off a tricky genre-melding play that manages to string the audience along while dealing with some complex issues. The play refrains from any neat, moralising solution and instead implicates us in the story by the time the houselights come up. 

Everyone loves a good story, says Dan. It’s true: we all like a beginning, middle, and an end. Sometimes we’re even complicit in making a good story happen. And Colossal, a promising and insightful follow up to his acclaimed debut, delivers on just that.