Spotlight: One-person shows

I'm mystified by the proliferation of one-man and one-woman shows in which the one performer imitates a famous person. At the moment, the West End has George Gershwin Alone and All I [Mohamed Al Fayed] Want Is a British Passport!, but, as you read, audiences around the world are watching a reincarnation of a well-known author or entertainer - Ernest Hemingway, Will Rogers or Beatrice Lillie. Recently we have had Siân Phillips moaning like Marlene, Simon Callow being Dickens, Prunella Scales not amusing as Queen Victoria and Bette Bourne playing Quentin Crisp, who had his own one-man show playing himself.

I have always found these shows depressing - after thousands of years of theatre, with all the literary and technical resources of the art, why are we listening to just one person talking about himself or herself? Lacking substance and invention, flopping about in a no-man's-land between lecture and drama, neither one thing nor the other, these shows fail to engage me. Without the complexity and passion of a proper play, they are sustained by our knowledge of the character and our feelings about him or her. It also seems impertinent to assume the identities of greater artists, especially those whose performances can be heard on records or seen on video. Why do people want the false?

Almost a century ago, Max Beerbohm was similarly perplexed by the enthusiasm of an audience for simulacra of celebrities. One evening in 1906 he went to a suburban music hall, where a "man announced that he would impersonate some famous characters. Setting his back to the audience, he busied himself before a mirror, and presently turned round, wearing a tunic of khaki, a brown wig parted in the middle, and a moustache of the same colour. Thus disguised, he stared fixedly at us. Whether anyone ever looked less like Lord Kitchener is a point which I will not dare to decide. The audience, having been told whom to expect, clapped its hands." When the man's partner came on in the hairdo and costume of Queen Victoria the crowd roared again, showing that "they loved and revered the memory of her."

The audiences of today may not cheer when their "patriotic" button is pushed, but perhaps they, also, go to our more sophisticated shows to express their taste in company. They clap or chuckle when "George Gershwin" starts a standard or "Oscar Wilde" (Donald Sinden et al) puts on his "here-comes-the-epigram" face. I suppose it is, on a lower level, the same kind of warm smugness another type of audience enjoys when, in a Tom Stoppard play, it titters at an actor's saying "phenomenological" or "deconstruction." Other theatre-goers, less well informed, may come for an improving introduction to an author they always meant to get around to reading but never found the time. An internet diary of one American visitor to London shows how well The Importance of Being Oscar fulfilled this mission: "Reba and I both came away with the intent of reading some Wilde as soon as we can."

The "educational" nature of such performances also turns me against the one-person show. In addition, I loathe anything described as "bawdy," which at an early age I sussed meant "dirty but boring"; you showed your broad-mindedness with a dry chuckle, but laugh and you were marked a ruffian. Long ago I sulked through one of the early examples of this genre, Brief Lives, which holds the record (1,700 performances) for this type of show. Roy Dotrice, as John Aubrey, made a deeply respectable matinee audience giggle at lewd 17th-century gossip and even make noises of shocked delight when he went behind a screen for an audible pee. (This may have been the first use of a device that has now also become visible, though Leo McKern, as the old, ailing Boswell, contributed a variation by trying to pee.)

Over the years, I have seen a few one-person shows I enjoyed. Take two widely different examples: Debora Weston's See How Beautiful I Am, in which she played the schlock-novel writer Jacqueline Susann, and Corin Redgrave's Blunt Speaking, in which he impersonated the upper-class spy. In both, the actor-writer had brought to the characterisation not only research but imagination and, without resorting to sentimentality, was able to find a way to present a snob or a vulgarian as entertaining and sympathetic. That degree of intelligence and creativity is rare, however, and, when I can choose what I see, I take care to avoid anything that looks as if it has a single-member cast, such as an American play titled Evil Legacy: The Story of Lucretia Borgia. Though this evening may start out with several actors, it is a safe bet that, by the time the curtain comes down, it's a one-woman show.

'George Gershwin Alone', Duchess Theatre, London WC2 (020-7494 5075), to 17 April. 'All I Want Is a British Passport!', Soho Theatre, London W1 (020-7478 0100), to 13 March