Chasing Bono review, Soho Theatre: the entertaining agony of growing up next to Bono
"It sounds like a fecking dog-biscuit," scoffs the young Neil McCormick on learning that Paul Hewson, a fellow pupil at Mount Temple Comprehensive, Dublin, has changed his name to something snappier as part of his bid to become a rock-star. You have to hand it to the boy who would grow up to be the Telegraph’s esteemed music critic: it’s a line that’s both funny and true.
Seeing as how Hewson – aka Bono – wound up becoming as big as Jesus, rock-world wise, as part of the unstoppable fire that is U2, you could say he had the last laugh. Except that McCormick has a neat sideline going, milking maximum mirth from the unfortunate and plainly at times unhappy coincidence of attending the same school as the U2-ers and aspiring to the same chart-topping global adulation – only to have nothing to show for his musical ambitions but a heap of broken dreams.
First we had I Was Bono’s Doppelgänger – his 2004 memoir that displayed a Joycean eye for detail about vanished Dublin days. Then in 2011, the fictional big-screen treatment, Killing Bono, arrived, scripted by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (Porridge and so much more); hated by the Irish Times, it stands up well enough actually and even boasts a swansong turn from Pete Postlethwaite, uttering the sobering parting wisdom: "The measure of a man is what’s left when fame falls away". Now Clement and La Frenais have reconceived their efforts for the stage, turning "Killing" into "Chasing", scrapping the primal (nay bonobo-like) vengefulness that helped motor the movie.
To chase Bono becomes a byword for chasing an elusive goal, and the evening is structured round a series of reverie-like flashbacks which emerge during a bizarre, blackly comic hostage-situation. Reeling from the genius (and seeming outrageous ingratitude) of the newly recorded U2 stonker I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, in 1987, our disconsolate hero (a dashing, sweetly doleful Niall McNamee) gets ambushed in the street, and thrown on the mercy of Dublin gangster Danny in a crumbling farm-house.
The deal is that he gets out alive if he pens a glowing interview on a stolen typewriter to improve the hardman’s public image. Denis Conway’s deluded old lag and Ciaran Dowd as his cartoon-thicko sidekick almost put the action in Martin McDonagh territory, but they prove merely a footnote to the footnote of McCormick’s pop career, re-sketched in entertainingly excruciating detail.
Some mid-Seventies efforts, strummed out at the family home (the same tumble-down set serves for sundry locations in Gordon Anderson’s smartly acted production), sound distinctly sophomoric. A cheesy ballad "Pass the Pepperoni Pizza, Baby" gets crooned to younger brother Ivan (Donal Finn) without irony, and that’s the joke. The gap between mediocre material and cocksure mind-set makes the auditorium rattle and hum with laughter even as it vibrates with mounting pathos. Some later numbers work a treat, though – ouch!
If we haven’t all had the agony of coming so close to mind-blowing fame – an agony as much sustained as alleviated, you feel, by Bono’s ongoing bonhomie towards his old pal – many of us can identify with (let’s call it) Salieri syndrome, the sense of being cursed by mediocrity in the exact field we yearn to blaze in.
The piece moves briskly on, soon arriving at a disastrous bid to conquer London, in a make-or-break gig booked – you couldn’t make it up – on the same, U2-beatifying day as Live Aid. Needless to say, Shane O’Regan steals the show as Bono – moving from fragile, ordinary schoolboy to seen-it-all, shades-clad shaman, oozing innate confidence. He gives the final wave after the cast take their bows, damn him!
Until Jan 19. Tickets: 020 7478 0100; sohotheatre.com
