大象传媒

At the beginning of the show, Peter Wilson takes to the stage to explain to the audience that they're going to be introduced to three people; firstly, opening act Hannah Peel, then silent film star Hector Mann and, finally, Mother Courage.

In hindsight, Peel's spectral folk represented the calm before the storm, and by the end of first song The Almond Tree, her fragile yet resonant voice had the audience firmly under her spell. Even if she wasn't a nymph-like redhead playing arcane instruments, comparisons to Joanna Newsom would still surely be inevitable, for her haunting, off-kilter take on folk shares much with Newsom's earlier work. 听Yet anyone who has heard her haunting take on Cocteau Twins' 'Sugar Hiccup' will attest that Peel is very much an intriguing artist in her own right, and certainly one to watch in future.

Fittingly, the Duke and his band take to the stage against a backdrop of grainy, black-and-white footage of local performers extolling the cinematic virtues of the mysterious Mann (among them, Neil Hannon - who contributed to The Stage, A Book and The Silver Screen project this show is promoting).

'Hearth & Home's swinging romp set the template for the Mann section, with the phenomenal backing band's rolling bass and tooting clarinet evoking beautifully the jazz age that Mann inhabited, while Wilson leads the audience along one of his artfully crafted narratives.

The show's 听strange mixture of the dramatic, the literary and the musical was encapsulated during the chorus of 'Jumping Jacks', with Wilson proffering a prop suitcase to the audience, while singing one of the show's strongest melodies.

However, Wilson is by no means a born dramatic performer. Rather, he is someone whose voice and music has the ability to keep an audience spell-bound. This point is made very clear during 'Mr Nobody', when, from his familiar position behind the piano, he delivered the night's stand-out performance, easily eclipsing the rest of the set.

As the spine-tingling melody of devastating set-closer Scandal, rang out, a fading spotlight picked out Mann's iconic white jacket at the side of the stage, and many were surely moved to the verge of tears for a person they may never have heard of previously. 听It is a testament to Wilson's sheer verve and talent that, with such an overblown conceit, he can pack such a devastating emotional punch.

The Mother Courage set opened with a rousing, fist-waving ode to war that was sadly not a harbinger of things to come, as this section of the show did drag slightly.

Having mentioned that Wilson's principal talents do not lie in the realm of dramatics, it is no surprise that the 'theatrical' section of the night (inspired by Brecht's play, Mother Courage) is the weakest. Once again, this point was underlined when, during the revelatory Yvette, our star returned to his 'comfort-zone', behind the piano, and the performance almost audibly shifted up a gear.

It is, of course, in the nature of such a hugely ambitious project that something must be omitted, but it might be said that the one person we didn't fully encounter over the course of the night was Duke Special himself. 听The fleeting glances we were afforded made us miss him all the more.

Words: John Heaney

Photos: Richard Skinner -