FringeReview UK 2024

Boys on the Verge of Tears

Soho Theatre

Genre: Contemporary, Drama, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Soho Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Toilets are contested territory. In Harry McDonald’s recent Foam at the Finborough, covering a life in urinals of a gay Nazi skinhead from 1974-93 (based on a true story), we’ve had musicals and for instance Rachel Hirons’ When Women Wee.

So Verity Bargate Award-winner Sam Grabiner’s debut play Boys on the Verge of Tears  -which premieres at the Soho Theatre directed by James Macdonald, till May 18^th – follows a trend. Uniquely, it turbo-charges a life in urinals with 39 characters ranging from toddlerhood to young adult, inflected with elders bringing (usually) truth and reconciliation.

Ashley Martin-Davis’s set is naturalistic: four-urinals, four toilets, four basins. There’s four horsemen of the Apocalypse too. It deteriorates: grafitti’d with blue-spray paint, walls punched in so cubicle walls collapse. There’s a reversal towards the end. Peter Mumford’s lighting renders the place spectral as trip-switches kick in; other lights reveal a haunted world.

With July’s fancy dress party outside Ian Dickinson’s sound is particularly effective stretching out silences with no music. We need other sound designs like this.

Grabiner’s provided wicked dialogue and vivid scenarios: though it’s the five actors trying on voices and roles who bring Grabiner’s lapidary dialogue to life. Working with Martin-Davis, costume supervisor Zoe Thomas-Webb manages an outstanding riff of changes as each actor inflects, twitches or hunches a character through the doors, or occasionally emerges through a cubicle.

There’s schoolgirls, drag-queens, those who apparate in a dress fit for a dragonfly, or tiger onesie. Some are hilariously unsanitary, others fastidious. All are named save the last two in the longest scene, but mostly not on stage. They serve as aides-memoires.

Matthew Beard flickers through teendom, memorable as Jack in describing at length his loss of virginity: it’s details that are so telling. Beard, tall and wiry, shadows his own presence, a hesitancy, a haunting as he ripples through brashness to braggadocio to fright to wonder, as Kay who in a long paean to lost chances didn’t ask the most beautiful girl he’d seen for her number. “”Next thing I know I’m at Tottenham and I think I‘ve missed the best thing that could ever have happened to me.”

David Carlyle shifts from the avuncular Father at the start to Marty the paramedic in training (as we progressively discover, he’s not quite the doctor he states, but trying to reassure someone) tending a traumatised adolescent. He’s excellent in other bullish roles but his tenderness in drawn-out scenes are the most memorable.

Calvin Demba who flicks from hero-worshipping schoolboy to that tiger onesie to swagger is extraordinary in one scene as Jo, clubbing adolescent severely beaten up by one group then fed Ketamine by others who’ve not realised, or don’t care how he’s concussed (Marty’s already recommended him to hospital).

His every flinch, his blank concussion stare and fitting are marvellously realised. In the most virtuoso scene of all, the other four revellers declare they’re the aforesaid Horsemen, then morph into paramedics wheeling him off. The ritualistic unforms of both suggest one’s a hallucination; Mumford’s lighting here ghosts us into a twilight universe. It’s this liminal world Grabiner might explore next.

Maanuv Thiara often listener or reinforcer to Beard’s monologues, brings stylish realisations of teen games, strut as a tuxedo’d, very strayed reveller.

After a rapt silent interlude where two cleaners apply as much TLC to the battered toilets as they can, Tom Espiner’s finest scene by far is as an unnamed Stepfather in a Father Christmas suit. He needs to change his colostomy bag, clean his stoma, helped by his new Stepson (a flinching Beard). It’s not impending death that embarrasses, but talk of his discovery of sex with the boy’s mother at a very late age. “And you’ve a body, kid.” “Kid is pushing it a little” ripostes Stepson but the point’s made.

After all the comedy of unsanitary actions preceding, the restoration of cleaning and care in these two sanctify the use of the battered space.

There’s a beautiful payoff at the end linking to the beginning. After exactly two hours straight through the work’s end is satisfying; the pace allowing absorption of key scenes and rush of appearances, sometimes just seconds. Macdonald ensures the scene transitions tell.

The strength of Grabiner’s dialogue isn’t so much in its individuality as yet, or sparkling brilliance, but its virtuoso fit of gambits and registers to 39 characters, and its residual wisdom, as with the Stepfather. Its ambition might outstrip the sheer invention of these characters on occasion (not by much), but it’s an exciting, fragile world Grabiner’s promised us in the future.

Published April 26, 2024 by Simon Jenner