THE UNDERGROUND MAN

Well before the first tape expires, it becomes impossible to imagine any voice other than Michael Cochrane’s inhabiting Jackson's eccentric, tragic hero, the fifth Duke of Portland. Based on a real nineteenth-century figure who unaccountably spent his time and wealth building a series of tunnels beneath his English estate, Jackson’s story portrays the duke’s journey into madness as he nurses a hurt the decades-old origins of which he pieces together only at life’s end. The tale is told through the duke’s journals and is interspersed occasionally with the observations of the duke's staff and neighbors, who are wholly flummoxed and unnerved by his bizarre behaviors. Cochrane masters these diverse characters, but his triumph is his rendering of the duke himself, at once exuberant and quixotic, as well as terribly affecting and sad. M.O. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 04/ JAN 05]