One-Man Star Wars Trilogy


When I read that Charles Ross, the creator and performer of 'One-Man Star Wars Trilogy', had seen the original films 400 times by age ten, I assumed I'd be speaking to a hard-core nerd. In reality, he's a very down-to-earth actor who enjoyed the films but does not obsess over them. He's also very obliging, squeezing in our interview that, due to international time differences, he was expecting an hour earlier.

"Where I grew up, before I was eleven years old, I lived in a sort of old part of Canada, where we didn't have any television reception, we had a video player and three films on tape," he explains.

"The other two films were in no way attractive to me, the only one that was, was 'Star Wars' ... so for me, I would quite honestly put it on as background television, and not necessarily sit and drool and watch it in that way, but just have it on."

Sounds like perfect preparation for a solo performance of the entire original trilogy... "Well, really what it is, is taking the original trilogy from the 1970s and 80s, and I've taken out all the props and the sets and the costumes, and I condense it down into one hour, which I do on stage," he tells me, very matter-of-fact. "It doesn't really seem like it would work, but funnily enough, it kind of does."

It certainly sounds like a mammoth task: taking an epic, three-movie long space opera and converting the story into a scant sixty minutes. How long does such a massive re-imagining take? "Maybe, maybe eight hours."

Oh.

"There's so much fat in the story that it really, really lends itself quite well to being edited down. If you just follow the story, the basic story of Luke Skywalker and don't pay much attention to the minor characters and their side tales, it's really quite streamlined. It's almost like a children's story, it's so simple."

So now I think I have a better handle on Charles Ross; not so much an Ÿber-geek as a fan who knows the series well enough to poke some fun at it.

"I don't take myself very seriously," he tells me. "I guess there are some people in the world who take 'Star Wars' seriously, but I think people who take that sort of thing too seriously really need to get out more."

Be that as it may, Ross is certainly not short of fans amongst the devoted. He performed his show at Celebration 3, a convention for the release of 'Revenge Of The Sith', and feedback is generally positive. "The weirdest thing I ever heard, and I have no idea if it was a 'Star Wars' fan or who it was, but someone had written to me, in an email thing, saying that the fact that I do this for a living was evidence of the coming Apocalypse."

And I have to ask: which is his favourite character from the trilogy? "Probably the character of the Emperor," says Ross. "He's just such a bastard."


Charles Ross performs 'One Man Star Wars' at the Royalty Theatre from Tues 27 March. To win a double pass for opening night see the Prize Frenzy(tm)