February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Brought to New York by Belfast’s Ransom Productions as part of the admirable Brits-Off-Broadway series which winds up July 4, ‘Hurricane,’ which was written by the performer, tells the dazzling rise-and-fall story of Alex Higgins, Britain’s most celebrated snooker champion.
‘Hurricane’ has been directed with brilliance by Irish-born Rachel O’Riordan, who, with Dormer as her partner, founded Ransom, Belfast’s newest theater company, in 2002.
Higgins, who, when it was suggested that he be dubbed ‘Hurricane Higgins’ for professional and promotional purposes, said that he’d prefer ‘Alexander-the-Great Higgins’ because, as he put it, ‘he conquered three-quarters of the known world,’ was a product of the Belfast slums who originally set himself the goal of becoming a jockey.
At 14, after having taken the night ferry from Belfast to Liverpool, Higgins easily found employment in English stables, but he also worked on his snooker game, since his natural excellence had won him the 1968 Northern Ireland amateur championship when he was barely 19.
By 1971, Higgins was living in Manchester, and it was in that hard-edged city that he turned professional. The next year, 1972, he won his first world championship.
His style, his manner, and virtually everything about his game was unorthodox and attention-getting, even to the point of being scandalous, and he drew press and public response like a magnet.
Higgins’s personal life was much the same, with bouts of alcoholism, drug addiction and unceasing romantic and marital embattlement.
Actor Dormer, slight, sinewy and agile as a greyhound, has done a remarkable job of making Higgins’s multi-faceted life spring to vivid life on the stage.
In the mid-sized of the three new playing spaces at 59E59, Theater B, dormer works in a four-sided area resembling a playpen, or an empty, shallow wading pool, or, perhaps more fittingly, an abstraction of a snooker table.
First seen as an elderly-seeming derelict in a battered coat, with a broad-brimmed hat obscuring his features, he keeps his back to the audience as he fends of the occasional autograph-seeker and marinates in his own self-pitying misery.
Then, in an instant, Dormer throws off the outerwear, and the years, and presents a Higgins in a red silk shirt, well-creased black trousers, and shiny black shoes that appear to have thickened soles and somewhat elevated heels, accommodating Higgins’s modest stature.
Charging around the walls bordering the central playing area of ‘Hurricane,’ the actor, in lightning-swift shifts in mood and tone, works his way through disparate, quick -sketch fragments of Higgins’s conflicted and self-defeating life, somehow emerging with a full-length, unified portrait of a driven and unhappy.
The squarish area bounded by those four wall-like structures is pristinely empty at the start and remains so for the opening few sequences of ‘Hurricane.’ Then, as Dormer turns up the volume and hits the pace pedal on his material, the space becomes littered, side to side and front to back, with the detritus of Alex Higgins’s out-of-control life: beer cans, cigarette packs, and money, loads and loads of money.
The ersatz currency, released when Dormer opens a shabby suitcase held high over his head, floats around him like falling snow before settling onto the floor of the playing area efficiently designed by Gary McCann.
Theater B, the 99-seat auditorium in the sparkling new three-stage East Side performing arts complex, 59E59, accommodates ‘Hurricane’ to perfection.
The space, similar to what university theater departments have lately taken to referring to as a ‘black box,’ resounds with every detail and every nuance of director O’Riordan’s tightly calibrated, hair-trigger production scheme, from John Riddell’s subtle, ever-shifting lighting plot to the carefully selected, pitch-perfect period rock-and-roll underscoring.