Based on the autobiographical book by arts journalist Jasper Rees, I Found My Horn is a delightful one-man show about childhood rediscovery which he adapted to the stage with actor Jonathan Guy Lewis.
Rees gave up playing the French horn at 17, a time when girls seemed a more worthwhile pursuit than musical ambitions (there is nothing remotely sexy about emptying a spit valve). Now, 40 and facing a midlife crisis, he once again puts lips to brass.
His early toots are pretty rusty (one person on the front row visibly recoiled) but he becomes fixated on earning a spot in the British Horn Society and making the modest odyssey from no-hoper to passable amateur.
Lewis brings comic self-deprecation to the fictionalised Rees and jumps between the play's many minor characters with skill — my personal favourite being a maniac music teacher who, with a snorting laugh, refers to Mozart as "Wolfy".
Lewis voices the horn too, which speaks to its owner in an Eastern European accent (because of the Czechoslovakian make, “Since you left me here they cancelled my country”). It’s one of those “only he can hear it” deals. Although, perhaps luckily, the horn doesn’t prove to be a very talkative sidekick.
I Found My Horn isn’t without bum notes — it could do without the “blowing” innuendos and Rees’s relationship with his nobody-understands-me son is clichéd — but Harry Burton’s production succeeds in evoking the nostalgia of a rekindled childhood hobby, even to those who (myself included) have never picked up an instrument in their life.
Until Sat May 3 (0844 871 7632, trafalgar-studios.co.uk)
