Matt Rudge: We Could Be Heroes

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What is it about a man’s home being his castle? Last year, Russell Kane took Fringe gold with an inventive deconstruction of his working class family and their home. In We Could Be Heroes, Matt Rudge recreates the living room of his Somerset home exactly as it was when he was 13.

Ostensibly Rudge is going back to his roots to discover what has gone wrong with his career over the last year. It’s a rather surprising theme for a Fringe debut and one Rudge struggles to pull off effectively. His annus horribilis turns out to have been less unmitigated disaster and more a couple of standard, if unfortunate, bumps in the road: not getting the TV show he wanted, not making more money, etc.

Rudge’s interaction with the sparse crowd is polished and he knows his way around a joke, but the laughs are too infrequent and predictable. A letter written to his future self, supposedly for a history assignment in 1995, feels forced and sterile, while quips about Robocop and Rambo quickly grow tiring.

We Could Be Heroes lacks the depth and subtlety of Kane’s Smokescreens and Castles. Rudge’s electrician father is less real, three-dimensional person and more strawman, set up to be knocked down with gags about car maintenance and coming out as middle-class. With a little more honesty and a little bravado, Rudge might have been Arnie. As it stands he’s Steven Seagal.