Absolutely reliable

"Fantastic!" Financial Times

"A deliciously dark tale, engagingly delivered" FringeReview

 

Absolutely Reliable! is a dark comedy that explores the vulnerability of a man in love from his skewball perspective in a delightfully comic monologue. George negotiates the tangled web of his increasingly darker side and confronts the struggles of surrender and commitment when he meets his true love. A surrealistic, rollicking, slightly creepy look into his world sheds tender light on the condition of contemporary intimacy.

Inspired by Beckett's ‘Worstward’ Ho and Gogol's ‘Diary of a Madman’, this solo-mask and movement performance is a unique blend of heart and politics. George is a white, middle aged, middle class, middle manager. He desperately craves female attention and touch. As he falls in love with the sensuous Josephine and gets closer to his dream, his inner demons take over and throw him into a maelstrom of desire, fear, lust, denial, love, death and rebirth.

 

Director and co-writer Lee Delong has transformed George’s anxieties and traumas into a raw investigation of contemporary norms of intimacy using dark comedy. Co-author Ralf Wetzel wears a mask that fits him like a glove. It has a transfixing power and sometimes one forgets that it’s a mask, so much so that Wetzel plays two distinct characters - male and female – with the same mask. Negotiating a labyrinth of increasingly comic situations, George is peeled away like an onion to reveal a surprising truth.

 

Written by Lee Delong & Ralf Wetzel

Directed by Lee Delong

With Ralf Wetzel

Masks by Steven John Cooper

 

Trailer