Force with you for just an hour

For those who have never seen the original Star Wars trilogy and can't face six hours staring at a screen, a one-man show in New York recounts the whole story in under an hour.

Charles Ross, a 31-year-old actor from Canada who's seen Star Wars 400 times, admits his show may be a surreal experience for anybody who does not know the three classic George Lucas films as well as he does.

Described in a Newsday review as an "entertainingly nerdy show", the One-Man Star Wars Trilogy is a fast-paced romp in which Ross plays every character from Luke Skywalker to Princess Leia, R2D2 to Han Solo.

Ross insists he hasn't seen the films in full since 1997, but as a teenager used to get up early to watch them on video, day after day. He wrote the show from memory and has been performing it for three years, starting at small venues and working his way up to a performance for 3500 people at a launch event for the latest Star Wars movie,

"I figure if I can perform it more times than I've seen the movies, I'll have exorcised the demons," Ross says. And so far he's clocked up 300 shows.

Audiences appear to know the originals almost as well as Ross and their biggest laughs are for inside jokes such as when he notes in an aside that one character mispronounced Princess Leia's name, or that Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, would "never work again" after Star Wars.

"It's like the English bard tradition, it's something a lot of people know so well," Ross says, attributing the appeal to the story and merchandising.

"It appeals to the little guy in everybody, a person who comes from nowhere in particular seems to have this potential to be the most incredible person in the world," he said.

He has also developed a One Man Lord of the Rings which tends to draw a more varied crowd than Star Wars.

"With Star Wars the demographic tends to be men from 20 to 60, whereas with Lord of the Rings, maybe because there's all those handsome guys in the films, there tend to be a lot of women fans."

- REUTERS