An Audience with the Mafia

Published Monday 28 January 2008 at 12:40 by Nuala Calvi

One wonders whether the anonymous Mercy Man who apparently wrote and performs this run-down of Mafia history has been blackmailed into producing a script overnight and forced onto the stage at gunpoint to present it.

Certainly his delivery - somewhere between a schoolboy being tested on Important Dates by his history teacher and a tottering, absent-minded Frank Gallagher from Shameless - suggests he is tortured both mentally and physically by the ordeal.

And you can’t blame him. Trying to squeeze the names and potted histories of every Mafioso of the past century into a two-hour show is no easy undertaking, and to his credit the level of research and sheer feat of memory are impressive. It’s just that writing a Wikipedia-style entry on the mob and reading it out loud in front of an audience is not the same as creating a piece of theatre.

Here and there our Man assumes the identity of his subjects, but whether it’s Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schultz or Al Capone his voice and mannerisms remain unchanged.

His occasional sidekick, Nicole Faraday, tries heroically to act for two, strutting about in a series of outfits ranging from policewoman to flapper girl and at least attempting a New York accent.

More engaging are the real-life photographs of the mobsters that flash overhead - often mug shots or crime scene snaps - which reveal the revered figures commanding their multi-million dollar death squads to be rather comic, pug-faced youths.