One Shot at the Herald Theatre

Reviewed by FRANCIS TILL

The publicity for writer/director Mark Kilmurry's One Shot includes a warning that firearms are used during the performance, a notice that induces an appealing frisson of menace.

From the ominously striking opening scenes on, there is no doubt that someone will be shot by the end. The only questions are who and why.

In finding out, we enter fully the feverish mind of Charlie Murray (John Trutwin), a man cursed with the existential attributes of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle and obsessed with the actor who portrayed him, Robert DeNiro.

We are given a simple set: one battered side chair with a shapeless, military-style coat draped on its back; a small table; a metal box on the floor beside it. In the box are five pistols, to be extracted one by one and exhibited reverentially before being placed on the table.

These were Bickle's tools. They are also Murray's, as he endlessly rehearses scenes from DeNiro's film noir tranche, films that show the "real" DeNiro, the one Murray identifies with so completely that he has come to think of himself and the actor as alter egos, almost as manifestations of the same human being.

The real horror of the piece, as in much of DeNiro's work, lies in the brutal fact that a man woven of fictions can have a shockingly lethal effect in collision with the real world.

Trutwin, assisted by brilliant lighting and wonderful music, conjures Murray completely.

A "love story" drives the action, reprising the cataclysmic relationship between Bickle and Betsy, in Taxi Driver, as a stumble into stalking between Murray and (we are told) Cybill Shepherd look-alike Marie.

It is also a script charged with alluring subtext possibilities. While the name Murray, for example, may be Mafia-speak for someone who thinks he is better than he is, Charles Murray is also the name of an actor who played the Wizard in a 1925 version of the Wizard of Oz, and Wizard was the name of a key character in Taxi Driver.

More, the initials of the star-stalker who shot John Lennon dead ("MC") are mirrored by Murray's "CM".