“Here is the man who has everything – limitless wine on tap and over 700 women to tap. He is fabulously wealthy, his country is at peace, his people are (for the most part) content. But what on Earth is the point of it all?”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars (Nae Bad)

A person born in the 5th century BC could, theoretically, have met Socrates, The Buddha, Zoroaster, and a host of other top-shelf thinkers. Gore Vidal wrote a novel with that premise. His protagonist, a Persian ambassador, crosses the world, from Athens to China and back again, but takes no interest that part of the world inhabited by Solomon the Wise and his descendants. Rabbinic tradition holds that Ecclesiastes was written by the King in his auld age (in the 930s BC) and yet the presence in the text of many Persian loanwords, some scholars argue, points to a composition date no earlier than about 450 BCE. Was Soloman a precursor, or was he a contemporary, of the great minds Gore’s fictional ambassador encountered?

We enter to find a stage empty but for a tall chair. Stephen Bathurst – BA (Hons) Acting, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – enters as a herald announcing the imminent arrival of King Solomon who is due to give a state of the nation address to his people. Bathurst exits and Solomon enters. He’s a less than impressive figure. Tired. Bored. Drunk. Slumped in his underwear. Here is the man who has everything – limitless wine on tap and over 700 women to tap. He is fabulously wealthy, his country is at peace, his people are (for the most part) content. But what on Earth is the point of it all? Life! Don’t talk to me about life!

What follows is an up close and personal meditation on Solomon – the man beneath the legend, the monarch behind the glamour. Bathurst’s delivery (despite the underpants paired with a hot pink feather boa) is anything but camp. This is not John Hurt’s Caligula in TV’s I, Claudius. Comic interactions with the audience, including a freshly hired and much put-upon Royal Cupbearer, push but never entirely break the magic. Here, laid bare, is one of history’s most recognisable individuals utterly lost, dwarfed firstly by his own accomplishments and then, in great auld age, put mercilessly into the total perspective vortex by the infinity of creation.

In the Q&A that follows this pacy and poignant monologue, Bathurst ponders on the high rates of depression and suicide in his adoptive Scandinavian homeland. How can people who have so much feel so empty? There is an answer. There is The Answer. But this is a show about the BIG question no single human being has ever entirely answered. Few works of visual art down the centuries can boast of matching Scripture’s vision of Solomon’s magnificent desolation as it is rendered in Holy prose. Bathurst’s startling and ambitious ‘Life Under The Sun’ is one of them.

Reviewer: Dan Lentell

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