One of the most surprising, not to say affecting, aspects of Mr. Oxley’s one man show is… But that’s not how to start a review: conventions must be observed. We’ll arrive at that bit in due course…

St. Helen’s Church was an inspired choice of venue for Stephen Oxley’s performance of his one-man adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: memorials to Sterne’s contemporaries from York’s ‘Good Humour Club’ shiver on its walls, while the church’s position between his printer on Coney Street and John Hinxman’s bookshop on Stonegate means that Sterne himself would have passed under its distinctive lantern tower many times. There was also something gratifying about the ribaldry of Oxley’s adaptation taking place on hallowed turf, given that Sterne was a clergyman. The performance, directed by Felicity Dean, marked the tercentenary of Laurence Sterne’s birth, and the remarkable fact that Tristram Shandy has never been out of print. It begins with a be-gowned Oxley delivering a stultifying peroration from the lectern, before tossing the sheaves of his sermon in a bravura gesture that also shakes off his priestly robes and establishes the irreverent tone. The focal point of the minimalist set design is a sturdy chest, which is given the range of a character actor from an Ealing comedy thanks to Oxley’s artful interactions. During Tristram’s conception it doubles as the conjugal bed (with Oxley as Mrs. Shandy slumped over it) and as Mrs. Shandy herself, while Oxley as Tristram’s climacteric father delivers an unforgettable facial expression. Its slamming lid also supplies the wince-producing sound effects in the sash window scene.

Sterne’s novel so effectively parodies the ludicrous sonorities and euphemisms arbitrarily thrown up by language that it is small wonder Oxley saw its stand-up potential. Trained at Rose Bruford College, Oxley has had a string of successes on the Edinburgh Fringe, including Memories of Amnesia, in which he performed brain surgery on a cabbage. The surreal is never far from Oxley’s repertoire: at one point here, he abjures the stage in order to sit amongst the audience – an experimental enactment of “the death of the narrator” – before realising that it will not wash. There are the customary revue-style flourishes germane to a one-man show: Walter Shandy enunciates in broad Yorkshire, while Trim aspirates in Cockney. Oxley’s performance is highly energetic without being manic; digressions become movement, peripatetic when Tristram mounts some passing hobbyhorse. He has a comic’s sense of connivance with the audience, as when he whispers the nature of Tristram’s unfortunate accident to one lady, whose voluble reactions paint a more vivid image than narration alone could.

An adaptation is probably only justified by mining potential unrealised by the original. This is both an exciting and a daunting prospect in the case of Tristram Shandy, a novel whose meta-fictional references have become proverbial, and which is seen by many as “postmodern” avant la lettre. This is a view held by such distinct personages as Salman Rushdie and Steve Coogan. The latter’s 2006 film version, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, exploited the vagaries that beset those attempting to adapt the “unadaptable”. Inevitably, such an approach risks expropriating the novel as mere period window-dressing for twenty-first century clichés about authorial angst. Oxley’s performance largely resists this temptation: in one striking physical rendering of a metaphysical metaphor, Oxley as Tristram crawls from under the invisible curtain that partitions plot from digression; in another, as Uncle Toby, he spreads the campaign map over his groin to point out the exact location of the wound. He is continually inventive rather than capitulating to ironic detachment.

It is not merely a case of seeing the dramatic potential of the novel; it is a sense of the importance of drama to narrative as such that distinguishes Oxley’s nuanced adaptation. His ability to luxuriate in the richness of gesture colluding or colliding with language is reminiscent of British comedians such as Tommy Cooper and Ronnie Barker. Hopping from one scene and time frame to another, leaping between roles, he enacts for us in real time the tremendous reach of Tristram’s narrative voice. 

Occasionally, the sesquipedalian phrases of Sterne prove difficult for even Oxley’s rapier tongue. Also, and notwithstanding the refusal to indulge in postmodern wallowing, there is a legitimate question as to whether the sixty-five minute abridgement he delivers is enough to do justice to Sterne’s 600-odd pages. Acknowledging the fact, Oxley does include this lament by Tristram: ‘O ye powers!… which enable mortal man to tell a story worth the hearing – that kindly shew him, where he is to begin it – and where he is to end it – what he is to put in it – and what he is to leave out…’

‘– and where he is to end it –’ …. There is one remarkable factor in Mr. Oxley’s performance, and it is the brief moments of genuine pathos he brings to his performance of Tristram Shandy, affecting not because they contrast with the exuberant comedy of the performance as a whole, but because they refine and complete it. They are no more than intimations. For instance, during an excursus on his father’s theories of phrenology, Oxley as Tristram regards the skull with what can only be described as acute insight, before he glibly parodies Hamlet and restores the prevailing mood. There is a sense that all the blether, all the bravado and bluster is weaving a defence against mortality – just as digression resists the terminal point of progression. Oxley’s performance gives the sheerest glimpse of the other mask behind Comedy’s leer: kissing the hand of a member of the audience, he meditates on the brevity of life, the Heraclitean nature of things, before, with a comic’s finesse, he convinces us of the judiciousness of his adaptation, ending by striking the same cocky, bullish pose at the lectern as that with which he began.