Erin Murray Quinlan’s ‘Brain Hemingway’ returns for a second year at the Edinburgh Fringe, but it’s the first time theQR has seen it. What a brilliant piece of theatre, and a masterful exercise in turning lemons into lemonade.
The set-up is elegantly simple. A blocked musical-playwright (Erin Murray Quinlan) is on a strict deadline, but her mind is trapped in thoughts of her last failed show: A show about Ernest Hemmingway. Now ‘Ernest’ (Evan Quinlan), or at least her traitorous brain’s conjuration of Ernest, refuses to leave her in peace.
Inspired by Murray Quinlan’s real life experiences of opening a less than successful Ernest Hemmingway based show, it could very easily go wrong. After all, writing about writers has been done to death, murdered by a thousand so-so paper cuts; and trying to so directly sublimate a traumatic experience into theatrical gold, could swiftly turn into over-obvious therapy by staging. Reader, be relieved, because Brain Hemingway not only negotiates this treacherous landscape, it triumphs over it.
This is genuine theatrical comedy, the dialogue rich, sharp, and laugh out loud funny. However, Brain Hemingway is no farce, and the underpinning themes of mental health struggles, waning self-belief, and low self-esteem are threaded delicately through every moment. Yes, much of the comedy works because Evan Quinlan’s Hemmingway is such an urbane, self-confident ass, but his barbs are not without consequence. His creator, as it were, knows he isn’t real, knows he is a figment of her overflowing, and stressed imagination, but that doesn’t stop his forensic dissection efforts cutting deep.
Ultimately though, this is a play with a hopeful message, suggesting that neurodiversity might offer possibilities as well as challenges. It also breaks into song at the most surprising moments, and the songs…are rather good!
Kudos are due to both performers. Evan Quinlan obviously enjoys the lion’s share of the punchlines, and he delivers each with relish. It’s not all witty, sarcastic, pompous criticism of his ‘imaginer’ though, he’s also an absurd character, bounded in knowledge where hers stops, and prone to making things up with utter surety. In response, Murray Quinlan is first rate as the play’s functional straight-man, and does well to engender the audience’s sympathies with a confident, nuanced performance. She’s not just a victim of her brain, much as it seems to be out to get her at times, she has agency.
So bravo Brain Hemingway, what a compact, ambitious, funny, and surprising play. Go for ‘Ernest’s’ endless supply of hilarious self-aggrandisement, and inventive insults, and stay for a very tidy piece of musical theatre, ‘the shampoo-conditioner’ of the arts, as ‘Ernest’ would have it.
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