STAGE
I Found My Horn
Hampstead Theatre
3/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Jonathan Guy Lewis brings to life Jasper Rees's comic memoir about his epic wrestle with the orchestra's toughest instrument.
REVIEW
You look at the title - I Found My Horn - and you think... I hope they don't (I know they're going to but...) but I hope they don't go there too often.
I mean, we have the BBC Light Programme back catalogue for all that. But, it's an easy laugh. That whole horn=instrument=genitalia arena is vast and encompassing and accommodating. It's vulgar enough yet safe enough... but I just hope they don't...
... and they do. A little. Writer Jasper Rees, co-author and actor Jonathan Guy Lewis and director Harry Burton do a little (I guess, ultimately, you have to).
Just enough so they acknowledge to the audience what the audience already knows. Because the audience is divided into those who had told chums they were going to see I Found My Horn and laced the telling with a lascivious beer-lashed snigger and those who just said they were going to the theatre to see a piece about Mozart.
So Rees and Lewis and Burton do a little. But mostly it is a more sophisticated anthropological take on the horn=instrument=genitalia metaphor with the horn being the mojo. The self-possession. The joie de vivre. The lust for life. The ramrod proud prow of a defeated man... (See? See where it takes you if you're not careful?)
And it is funny and moving and musical and actor Jonathan Guy Lewis gives spit and texture in his recreation of a cast of characters from Jasper Rees's memoir of the same name (although, interestingly, renamed A Devil To Play in the US which suggests the US was deprived of the BBC Light Programme).
The story is this. Jasper Rees abandoned the French horn as soon as his parents stopped nagging him. Some 25 years later, the 40something man finds himself accommodating his truculent kids at weekends while he comes to terms with a divorce and a feeling that he has yet to make his mark.
The French horn is notoriously difficult so he announces (mostly to himself) that he will play Mozart's Horn Concerto No.3 K.447 at the following year's annual shindig for the British horn elite.
And we take the journey, back in time to patronising music teachers, and up to date with plain-spoken mentor Dave Lee and inspiring professionals at US horn camp (See? See what happens?) and we experience his doubt become courage become doubt again before flowering into the keenest form of courage - courage despite doubt.
Lewis can play too. A glint in his eye when he's making pleasantly discordant mistakes and a full-on gung-ho passion for the final rendition. He earns applause in the same way that plumbers earn a cuppa. It's hard graft, digging it out, making it flow against the odds.
If the story is simplistic and shallow in places it also means the production never tries too hard to be something it isn't. This ensures the finale is affecting, funny and wonderfully satisfying.
A sharp comedy, you could say, if you like your puns.
