If you’re looking for some uplifting entertainment this weekend in Florence, head to Teatro Niccolini for the one-man musical play, I Found My Horn, starring Jonathan Guy Lewis. The premise of the show is a man who tries to make music again, confronting his entire existence, as he comes across the French horn of his childhood in the midst of a midlife crisis. We chat with actor and musician Jonathan Guy Lewis, Jasper Rees, who wrote the best-selling book on which the play is based, and director Harry Burton a few hours before they journey to Florence to perform the show for the first time in Italy.
How did the idea come about to bring I Found My Horn to Florence’s Teatro Niccolini?
Jasper Rees: I’ve known Hershey Felder (artistic director of Teatro Niccolini, ed.) for about 20 years and Jonny’s known Hershey for ten years, and we’ve always wanted to do something. He brought us to The Laguna Playhouse about ten years ago or so to give one-off performance of I Found my Horn. We’ve always said, we must do it more, and in other places…Jonathan and I had a recce of Teatro Niccolini a couple of months ago. We were blown away by the sheer beauty of the place and the amazing restoration. And now, we’ve seen pictures of Jeff Goldblum and his band with a full house.
Helen: It’s this jewel box of a theatre, and it’s quite amazing that we’re having all of this world-class, English-friendly productions coming to Florence, which makes us very excited. Your play boasts incredible reviews, so what can we expect from I Found My Horn?
Harry Burton: Jasper’s too modest because he wrote the book that it’s based on, but I can tell you. It’s a very, very funny show. First and foremost, it’s extremely universal in its humanity, but also in its absurdity. We’ve done it in many different places, in India and in Abu Dhabi, and it speaks to everybody in the audience at some level. Its universality is partly to do with music and the healing power of beautiful classical music. This play is about a man who, at the bottom of his pit of despair, in a midlife crisis, realises that classical music is one of his first and greatest loves. It’s heartwarming and a crowd pleaser.
Jasper: I’m cued up to say that the humour comes from the fact that Jasper the character is based on my story, but Johnny brings much of his own personal inspiration too. Jasper hasn’t played the French horn for many years and he attempts to reignite this somewhat one-sided love affair. It involves a lot of kind of comic self-questioning, which Johnny is absolutely brilliant at.
Helen: What are the challenges involved in a one-man show? I hear the grand finale is quite something!
Jonathan Guy Lewis: One of the challenges is having to play badly and then play well because the mindset obviously is wanting to play well. The real challenge for me is playing the French horn. Like Jasper, I had this terrible experience as a boy playing the French horn because it is the hardest instrument in the Guinness Book of Records, as Jasper says in the play. Well, joint hardest with the oboe. It’s really dancing on a tightrope without a safety net. As the show has evolved over the years, some new voices have emerged, so the voice of the horn is now a really important part of the show. The fact that the horn talks to him, and the horn was made in Czechoslovakia. It’s got this Eastern European directness. It’s challenging because you are literally being a ventriloquist as well…Everyone gets drawn into the story and, by the end, I feel everyone willing me to succeed…I’m just thrilled to be coming to Florence and getting the chance to do it in this amazing theatre.
Helen: The French horn is notoriously one of the hardest instruments to master. Is there a horn community that this play speaks to?
Jasper: Very much so. The original performance was at the Guildhall School in London, which is where Jonathan actually studied as an actor, and I performed in front of 200 actual horn players, including Barry Tuckwell, who at that point was the most accomplished horn player in the world…We’ve taken it to the International Horn Symposium twice, once in London and once in Los Angeles. You get a particular reaction when Jonathan does the play there…A lot of horn players have seen this play and they always say nice things about how truthful it is to the challenges of trying to wrestle this instrument into submission in performance.
Jonathan: When we revived the show last year on our press night in this tiny theatre above a pub in London, I was suddenly told that the Horn Section of the Berlin Philharmonic were in the audience, along with the principal of the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and suddenly my bar of expectation had gone through the roof. I was terrified.
I Found My Horn will be performed at Florence’s Teatro Niccolini on Saturday October 5 and 6.
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