Leaping about the stage three years ago in Broadway’s “Brief Encounter,” Tristan Sturrock seemed to defy gravity. So it’s shocking to learn that he came very close to not being able to do that show, or much of anything else, at all.
The British actor was drunkenly returning home from a May Day in Cornwall nine years ago, when he fell off a wall and broke his neck. The results could have been death or near total paralysis. Instead, this real-life Humpty Dumpty made a miraculous recovery — the subject of “Mayday Mayday,” his superb one-man show.
On a stage littered with props — miniature skeletons and tiny models of ambulances and helicopters — the affable 45-year-old describes walking up a winding stone staircase when he answered a phone call from his then-pregnant girlfriend, Katy Carmichael. When the call ended abruptly, she enlisted a neighbor’s friend to find him. The stranger turned out to be a former paramedic, and his quick thinking saved Sturrock’s life.
Paralyzed, the actor lay in the hospital. Doctors told him he fractured his C5 vertebra, and that, if he wanted to avoid being a paraplegic for life, he had two options: He could either spend 18 to 24 months in a halo brace, so that the break could heal naturally, or endure a highly risky operation.
He chose the latter. Luckily for him and us, it worked.
As directed by Carmichael, now his wife and mother of their three children, Sturrock re-enacts what happened to him.
“What a stupid way to die . . . wedged between a garage and a wall,” he recalls thinking as he lay helpless. Haunting sound and lighting effects vividly convey the disorienting aspects of his experience.
That he’s recovered fully is clear in the way he moves, whether miming the calamitous fall in slow motion or imitating his first steps after the operation, his arms and legs moving as if pulled by a puppeteer’s strings.
It’s a scary but heartwarming tale that reminds us, as he says, “how fragile we all are.” By the time the show’s over, you feel grateful to be able to leave your seat and walk home.