FringeReview UK 2024

Foam

Croft & Dye Productions, Salt Lick Productions in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre

Genre: Fringe Theatre, LGBTQ+ Theatre, New Writing, Theatre

Venue: Finborough Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

In 85 minutes spanning 20 years you’ll see the most exciting new play in months unfold before you.

It’s 1974. A 15-year-old skinhead shaves his head into a basin in a public toilet. A black-clad man comes in, has a present. Harry McDonald’s Foam directed by Matthew Iliffe plays at the Finborough till April 13^th.

It’s compelling not because it’s based on real events, however extraordinary, but visceral, taut dialogue, jump-edits and superlative acting are married to a supreme paradox: identity assumed and surrendered, in a pair of boots. It should be added one delight is Pam Tait’s costumes modulating 20 years.

We’re in Nitin Parmar’s gleaming ceramic set, both spacious and claustrophobic. A basin, urinal, a toilet between where characters apparate and Jonathan Chan’s lighting through grills takes on garish colours.

Nicky Crane (Jake Richards) is both queer and a wannabe skinhead. But after grooming by an upper-class man who claims he’s 77 (he looks 40), Nicky thanks him for his gift of Doc Martens by breaking his nose. Mosley (Matthew Baldwin), humiliated, perhaps exalted, still offers him his club.

Nicky’s a fledged skinhead now, and (which doesn’t always follow) a neo-Nazi. Yet his identity is constructed over a fissure, far more fragile than it appears. Richards subtly morphs from raw 15-year-old to 19-year-old swagger to a 27-year-old challenged, a 31-year-old on his uppers. And as for being 34, it’s not what you’d expect.

Baldwin’s aerated use of original Mosley material transmuted into camp is a perfect foil for the rising articulation of Richards’ 15-year-old. A boy who learns to use words as weapons before he uses weapons.

Richards is one of the most unpredictably dangerous-seeming actors I’ve seen in a long time. He mainlines withheld violence which just occasionally explodes: you can’t tell exactly where the blow falls.

By the time we see him in 1978 toy with photographer and fan Gabriel (Kishore Walker)  – Nicky’s a punk performer now – Nicky’s language has become that of feinting violence and not delivering it, or perhaps he just might. He’s already a master of others’ fear; his use of pause and cat-like pounce isn’t assumed any more.

Ingenue Gabriel, dangling his camera, is putty though delivers a recurring line: “Everyone looks different in bathroom light.” Walker who later plays a contrasting role is radiantly innocent here. But Nicky’s peaked early; it’s not apparent till the end of Foam.

It’s different in 1986 though. “You forget I knew you were a queer long before I knew you were a fascist.” Bird (Keanu Adolphus Johnson) has like Nicky done time – in Bird’s case for pulverising a fascist; in Nicky’s case possibly someone died.

Here though Bird is master: he knows Nicky’s queer, bouncer in a gay club but not known to his own clan as one. Adolphus Johnson’s Bird is absolutely in his skin, taunting Nicky with not attacking him as a gay Black man, despite trying to hold him in the club toilet, keeping him from the divine Diana Ross. The face-off between these two is a highpoint, the antimonies of belief, exposing Nicky’s fractured identity, riveting.

The 1990 scene again delivers coups as we realise we’re actually shooting the scene twice. All the faux material – gasps of laughter at this point – are in suave director/actor Christopher (Walker) trying to get the most out of Nicky as a porn star. It ends though unpredictably, as Nicky faces rejection of a kind.

In the final 1993 scene, for the first time, albeit briefly we’re given three actors onstage. Admittedly Nurse (Adolphus Johnson again) is only on twice, but the richness of interaction makes me regret McDonald’s kept to Turgenev-like duetting.

With Craig (Baldwin) confidently high camp – Nicky criticises his public use of yellow shorts to cycle over – and tender, we finally see intimacy, but one stripped beyond its skin. Baldwin, wholly different to his provocative Mosley, is here the sad realist who himself might suffer a similar denial to Nicky. The last scene, wholly unsentimental, plays out with devastating candour.

The very thing that makes Foam so compelling in its structure – the jump-cuts over 20 years – can also render the texture samey, though this is judging by the highest standards. Different actors and scenarios all keep this compelling, though the unvarying duetting means there’s a processional sense that might benefit from roughing up the dramaturgy, adding a threesome or so.

This is though a quite stunning portrayal of a young man, apparently dislikeable, whom McDonald humanises by sheer force of presentation. It’s clear Nicky’s not only groomed but trapped in a strong body, itself stigmatised into a role by a particular culture he’s exposed to; he registers his internal fissures as rage.

Most of all this is close-up, visceral theatre, more edgy and even more exploratory than say Made in England. Ken Tynan might have said – again – he couldn’t really love someone who didn’t love this.

It’s a definition of theatre: looks back in rage, forward to a void, held back, just for a bit, by all you’re losing at once. Scorching script, outstanding acting, particularly by Richards, a must-see.

Published April 3, 2024April 3, 2024 by Simon Jenner