Friday March 29, 2024
One Man Star Wars Trilogy
Review

One Man Star Wars Trilogy

By Damian Madden
March 29 2007

Charles Ross’ One Man Star Wars Trilogy is exactly what the title implies: one man performing the entire Star Wars trilogy (that’s the original three films, episodes 4 to 6, for those who care).

While this may sound like something that would drive nerds and die-hards into a frenzy of fan-boy love, leaving everyone else scratching their heads, Ross manages to make his show accessible to everyone by focusing on the central story and not getting bogged down in semantics like ‘who shot first.’ However, that said, if you haven’t seen the films, or haven’t seen them recently, you should probably think twice about going as the success of One Man Star Wars Trilogy relies on your knowledge (and a pretty strong knowledge at that) of the material Ross is spoofing.

For around an hour, Ross (dressed in a black parachute suit) races around the stage, morphing his body and voice into a whole range of characters and machines (including imperial walkers, fighters and the millennium falcon) as he re-enacts the films. He is aided in this by some snappy direction from T.J Dawe, which keeps things moving and makes the most of some of the less obvious jokes in the films, and the clever lighting design by Mike Schaldemose which helps to clearly define different scenes through changes in colour.

Ross’ performance as everyone and everything in the films is, for the most part, spot on and the show is not without its funny moments, however, they become less frequent as the night draws on and the audience gets used to the gimmick. This is hardly surprising though given the fact that the show is a pretty literal translation/condensation of three films that aren’t comedies. Yet when One Man Star Wars Trilogy presents itself as a stand-up routine (and as part of a Comedy Festival) you expect to at least laugh throughout. Unfortunately this isn’t the case and the only people chuckling consistently were the fans who knew how clever some of the more obscure impersonations were, to everyone else it was just like re-watching Star Wars.

One Man Star Wars Trilogy

To hear an audio interview with Charles Ross check out episode 16 of StageCast.

 

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