Stuart A Life Backwards[author-post-rating] (4/5 stars)

Stuart Shorter was a troubled man in so many complicated, inter-connected ways, from drug abuse to homelessness to violent episodes, that it must have been almost impossible to pull them apart or trace them back to any kind of cause. If it was, that certainly didn’t deter Alexander Masters. Masters’s posthumous biography of Shorter sold all over the world and garnered him a Guardian First Book award, amongst heaps of other praise and prizes, for its sensitive, intelligent investigation into what murdered the little boy Shorter used to be. In this moving play, adapted from the book by BAFTA-winning writer Jack Thorne, Shorter’s tragedy and his brilliance are both captured with charm and grace.

At the outset, Stuart and Alexander’s friendship makes no objective sense. After all, what can these men, a privately educated academic and a homeless ex-con, have in common? But after two directors of a homeless charity are unfairly imprisoned, because the vulnerable people they help were dealing drugs in the accommodation, Stuart begins helping out on Alexander’s campaign team and something just clicks.

Fraser Ayres gives a remarkable performance as Stuart, mercurial and charismatic, with a thin, ever-present thread of danger underscoring his every gesture. This is a man who has known violence and horror, but remains funny and endlessly matter-of-fact about everything from his homelessness to his struggles with substances. It makes a nice contrast to the faltering awkwardness of Alexander, full of middle class reservations and played with real believability by Will Adamsdale. Adamsdale occasionally struggles with his lines and can seem to lack confidence compared to the other actors – but since Alexander is relatively naturally uncomfortable, it doesn’t hurt.

There’s strong support from a tight ensemble cast, keeping the energy up and the pace swift, but it’s in the long central conversation between Stuart and Alexander that Stuart: A Life Backwards is really elevated to another level. Ayres has a remarkable lightness of touch even as we begin to comprehend the full horror of what happened to Stuart, and that he cannot be expected to live with it forever.

By the time Shorter committed suicide in 2002, Masters was already working, with Shorter’s consent, on the biography that was to become Stuart: A Life Backwards. With Stuart no longer there, Alexander takes his research outside his friend’s own reminiscences, and the play becomes a beautiful consideration of loss, grief and memory, all the more complex because Alexander is not even completely sure what he has lost, or why it matters. Almost nobody saw Stuart the way he did; most people saw simply a violent addict, a troubled criminal. Adamsdale is affectingly desperate and thwarted, while Thorne slowly, subtly hints at the consequences of Alexander’s monomania to the exclusion of all else, even his relationship.

Alexander Masters’s quest was rewarded; his friend’s memory more than lives on, in print, on screen and now on stage. This is a lovely, delicate inheritor to the complex story of a troubled and, in many ways, brilliant man.

Stuart: A Life Backwards can be seen at 15.30 at Underbelly Topside, every day until 26th August. For more information and tickets, visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.