Agitated ‘mystery man’ responds only to a piano

LONDON – His suit and tie were dripping wet and he wouldn’t say a word despite his agitation. But when hospital staff showed the mysterious man a piano, he started playing – and wouldn’t stop for two hours.

The man was found wandering the streets in a coastal town in southeast England over a month ago and he has refused to communicate ever since, except through music.

“I cannot get within a yard of him without him becoming very anxious,” said Michael Camp, the social worker assigned to the tall blond man dubbed the “Piano Man” by hospital staff. “Yet at the piano he comes alive.”

Staff at Medway Maritime Hospital launched a search Monday for anyone who knows the man, who is in his 20s or early 30s and was found April 7 in the coastal town of Sheerness. He is being treated at a psychiatric unit in nearby Dartford.

The British press has likened the case to the Oscar-winning 1996 movie “Shine,” about acclaimed pianist David Helfgott, who suffered a nervous breakdown. But there appears to be little question the man is any more than an accomplished amateur.

Hospital chaplain the Rev. Steve Spencer said the man “is not the virtuoso that he has been portrayed in the press. He knows a small number of tunes and plays them over and over – I recognized some John Lennon and a snippet from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake.”’

“When he plays, he is totally focused – he cuts out everything else and it makes him calmer.”