Handel and the Darkening Moon

It's testimony to the loyal audience of the Tobacco Factory that their new space, the Brewery, attracts a healthy audience on one of this winter's coldest nights to see a one-man play in a graffiti-strewn former garage. The stark setting suits Tracy ­Spottiswoode's drama, with its slow-build attention to the harsher aspects of life, filtered through the story of ­Handel and interspersed with bursts of his ­glorious music. Paul Humpoletz plays Handel – or someone convinced he is the composer – in a ­performance switching between jolliness, lively anecdote and ­references to fractured ­memory, cancer and dying without a legacy. This mix of moods is the play's ­surprise and, in this format, its ­limitation. Humpoletz plays the ­various aspects confidently. But, the change from bleak to bright and vice versa is often unconvincing, and scenes in which the narrator jumps around to act out other characters jar. There are dramatic reasons for this, revealed in the final section, but the audience needs to be drawn into the existential depths before. This static set is a hurdle to imagining the ­layers and incidents in Handel's life, along with the darker narratives; the music is used to take us places instead of the words and performance. This is not to doubt the haunting power of some of the ­writing, but you can't help thinking that it might have worked ­better as an ambitious radio play.