The stadium-conquering rock celebrity Bono finds a smaller area than normal for this extra intimate and far acclaimed “quarter-man” present, carried out solo with out his U2 bandmates Adam Clayton, David “The Edge” Evans and Larry Mullen Jr and filmed stay on stage at New York’s Beacon theatre in 2023 by Andrew Dominik. It’s a assured, typically participating mixture of music and no-frills theatrical efficiency, with Bono typically coming throughout like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created however then suppressed on account of undue ranges of rock’n’roll pizzazz.
Bono delivers anecdotes from his autobiography Give up, beginning together with his current coronary heart scare and going again to his Dublin childhood, his musical breakthrough to international fame, his post-Reside Assist charity work on poverty and famine aid (although no discourse on the query of whether or not Reside Assist was a great factor), and his spiritual religion which evidently morphed from a radical Christianity in his teen years to a extra wide-embracing spirituality; it’s all interspersed with “unplugged” variations of U2 requirements accompanied by harp and cello.
It’s a efficiency delivered from the pulpit to the fanbase choir in fact, however Bono is definitely working laborious to discover a new register of humility in his public persona – although this colossally profitable determine will at all times bear in mind that he has rather a lot to be un-humble about. Nevertheless, he’s opening up about two crucial figures in his life: his mom and father, Iris and Bob Hewson, and Bono has a robust story to inform about his relationship with them. Iris collapsed and died at her personal father’s funeral when Bono was simply 14, and he and his brother Norman had been the close-up witnesses to his father’s retreat into shock and offended melancholy; Bob by no means talked about Iris once more, and his ache solely discovered an outlet in his love of classical music, with Bono internalising this silence.
Bono himself rehearsed with U2 within the early days in a constructing adjoining to the cemetery the place Iris was buried and by no means visited her grave there. Added to which, Bob had a tricky time coming to phrases with the truth that his son was an enormous star and the 2 settled right into a barbed and bantering relationship which precluded admitting that they cherished one another, and which had a really un-Hollywood ending at Bob’s deathbed. (I used to be sorry that the movie didn’t embrace the candy anecdote Bono has repeated in chatshows, that when Bob got here backstage after a U2 megashow, the one approach he may discover to congratulate his son’s efficiency was to say that it was very “skilled”.)
As for the opposite essential individuals in Bono’s life – his bandmates and his spouse Alison whom he married on the age of 21 – his relationship with them is (understandably) not explored onstage in the identical element. Even so, impressively, Bono does his greatest to descend from rock god to rock human.
