Calm and cool or hiding from the dangers and extremes of emotion? Marc Warren’s Cool Hand Luke is an enigmatic character.
Following the Oscar-nominated performance of Paul Newman – surely one of the coolest stars of all time until he created his own range of sauces – must be one of the toughest tasks going.
Marc Warren, known for his charismatic TV performances on series including Hustle and Mad Dogs, is the actor with the job. He certainly has the face for it – all brooding good looks and icy blue eyes that could freeze a soul – but it is so difficult to mix charisma with the enigmatic nonchalance required of a character famed for his cool, unemotional approach to life.
He plays former soldier Luke Jackson, who finds himself in a Florida chain gang, where his dislike for authority and lust for challenging the norm finds him transformed into somewhat of a legend, a saviour-figure on which the other convicts can build their hope. Fearing an uprising, the distinctly authoritarian guards have to put him in his place. But whose will is stronger?
The audience finds out in Andrew Loudon’s episodic production, in which short, sharp scenes are punctuated by spiritual songs reflecting on the protagonist’s position; each stage of his prison life is topped and tailed with music.
While most of the action takes place in a hot, sweaty Florida, where the sounds of crickets chirruping helps pass the day away, there is one swift gear change to World War II that explains a little of Luke’s past.
All talk during and after the show, however, was about one scene in particular, where Luke, for a bet, must eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in just one hour. It is the stand out scene of the entire show. Some might say it had the Eggs Factor. Others might exclaim it eggs-traordinary or say they were shell-shocked. I’d never reach for such puns, though the style and slickness of the stagecraft through which this feat is achieved is eggs-tremely impressive.
Though the images of war, the honesty of portraying allied forces as less than heroic and the barbarity of Brett Jones’s dislocated Boss Higgins are all harrowing, it is the stomach-clutching, buttock-tensing comedy of the feat of eating that will be proclaimed as egg-cellent.
MA