just so long as he remembers where he came from when he's rich and famous

This is so exciting: the show Adam is the gestalt of performing in at Edinburgh, the reason initially for my trip, just got this stunning review from the Scotsman. He reports that they're sold out for the rest of the run and getting lots of visits from agents and suchlike. He is going to have a Career.

I am so happy for him, and jealous of course, but that's my nature, and somehow the two coexist equitably. Ester gets the credit for 'discovering' him at Swarthmore, which is appropriate because she's a casting sub-agent now and will no doubt soon rise to prominence in that field. I want to give myself props for grabbing onto Adam early in my own directing (and giving him his start in characters he's too "too fresh-faced and slight" for) and not letting go. It's some consolation that two of the three of us have, um, moved briskly and dare I say successfully into the field we want to be in.

And to think before I got there he was telling me how bad the play was!

Five Stars : CROSS ROAD BLUES : Blues singer vs. soul man
reviewed by Jay Richardson

A taleof a Faustian pact at the dark heart of the blues, this seductive drama crackles with diabolic menace. More myth than man, Robert Johnson died, poisoned in a bar at just 26, with only a few recordings to his name. But his reputation as the guitarist who sold his soul for greatness became the blues' sinister underscore. In the prickly heat of a Deep South night, against a backdrop of racial tension, lynchings and voodoo, this superb single-act play brings his legendary sacrifice howling and moaning to life.

Squatting at a crossroads, Johnson (Kwesi Asiedu-Mensah) is a journeyman musician with a terrible past, desperate enough to test the fable of the big black man with the gift of songwriting who appears at midnight to tune guitars. But the gentleman (Adam Bisno) who squats beside him is white and educated, alternately beguiling and intimidating, proffering whisky, cigarettes and a terrible story of miscegenate love that destroys itself. He drags the younger man's life story from him and convinces him that real music is born in defiance of God - it is the soul's release from imprisonment. The frightened Johnson complains that the stranger would like to read him like a book, but, in truth, he has already been played like an instrument, his ambition and fear of persecution deliciously manipulated. You will never enjoy equality, so what price posterity, asks the demon.

The outcome is, of course, never in doubt. But the precocious David Hall, who wrote the play when he was just 19, creates an atmosphere of creeping, uncanny terror that grips from the start and never relinquishes. Through the charged poetry of the dialogue he evokes slavery's ensnaring legacy and, through one man's existential nightmare, the protesting quality of the blues. While Bisno initially appears too fresh-faced and slight for a tormentor, his darting eyes and sly smile quickly convince otherwise. Asiedu-Mensah is equally impressive, a well-built man who appears physically to shrink as the play progresses. And the denouement, in which Johnson sinks to his knees and sings his woe even as the devil unleashes a triumphal stream of verse, is mesmerising.