Forget Challengers, if it’s steamy tennis action you’re looking for, comic Adam Riches has read your mind and put together a delightfully funny and poignant one-man play about mercurial talent and seventies icon Jimmy Connors. The atmosphere is tense, the stage is set up like half a tennis court with an anxious audience inspecting from above, and you can spy a beleaguered figure, draped in a towel, awaiting the call to action. He springs to life with a counterfeit vitality to continue being thrashed in a US Open he used to run. His cockiness does not waver, however, and he makes sure to remind us – in-between tennis ball thwacks – just how important and great he used to be; Jimmy Connors, the Brash Basher of Belleville, eight major titles, the coolest goddamn name on the planet… a total emotional wreck, a past it old man shunted onto the graveyard slot.
You do not just see Adam Riches playing a character here, you see Jimmy Connors in all his glory and ignominy. Riches performs like a man possessed, he bounds about the stage, almost leaping into the crowd at certain points, he puts his very soul into every hit of imaginary tennis balls. But the quieter moments make the show, and Riches channels all of Connors’ distress and trauma in long soliloquies, switching seamlessly from Connors to his mother and to his “two-mom” as they exist in Connors reminiscences. Your heart aches for him as he bears his soul; you will him once more unto the breach.
All this is played out with the occasional support of startling drumbeats which give the show a musical rhythm as it accelerates unrelentingly into an inspiring conclusion. Jimmy is an absolute treat, it grabs you with both hands and doesn’t let go, it demands and feeds off your your rapt attention. All you can do is accept its brilliance and applaud an absolutely spent looking Adam Riches, drenched in sweat.
Adam Riches: Jimmy, 20.25, Summerhall, Until August 25