Edinburgh Fringe 2024
The Last Incel
Jamie Sykes
Genre: Drama, Fringe Theatre
Venue: Underbelly at Cowgate
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is an exceptionally well-crafted script which dazzles with direction that negotiates between the imagery and prejudice of incels to portray them as complicated beings. Whilst pulling no punches it provides us with a honed and human exploration, vulnerabilities abound with the tragedy of loneliness not just at its heart but showing how absence does not always make the heart grow softer.
Review
Three men. Alone. But online. Each with the other. Ranting, raving, unattractive and furious they have a celebration in mind as one of them is going to become a wizard: a 30-year-old virgin. Although a circumstance devoutly to be avoided by most of us, this is a gateway to their lives. One of them, cook boy, however, is missing. He has been indulging in sex with a woman. His crime has been perpetuated not once, but twice. He is summoned to the celebration and to join everyone online, but he hopes that his secret will not come out.
Unfortunately, the evidence arrives in the form of the very woman herself, a journalist who sees opportunity in the gathering of these online presences. She wants to know more whilst she challenges them, particularly Percy whose rampant misogyny is totally focussed on her and any woman. It is a difficult watch, at times as he becomes at one point pathetic, and at others pathetic but raging with it. It would be easy to dismiss him as yet another weirdo to be avoided in any conversation but here he is given not just a voice but a series of vulnerabilities which almost bring him out of himself. That he retreats back into his familiar hate, is welcome because it would feel too convenient for him to be yet another rescued mission, like a bedraggled cat on a Tik Tok video that is trying to get out of a canal in downtown Paris. Instead, we get the problem explored and the simple answers explored but the solutions only work in three out of the four confrontations. This problem needs more, needs understanding, not just of the problem and the effect of it but the person at the centre of the incel. This young Irish group understand that and have given us a brilliantly excoriating piece of character exploration.
The thing is this is also funny. It is very funny. In fact, the use of dance and music turns it into bleeding hilarious at times. It has been handled with great skill and whilst the humanity of each character is drawn with rounded characterisations on the page the skill of the actors, the director and the lighting and sound make this a complete process which is a joy.
By the end, Percy has been abandoned by one incel who has lost his virginity, one who has come out as gay and the 30-year-old wants to give up his virginity asking cook boy’s new-found female companion if she can help him abandon his incel loneliness. Percy is raging, still pathetic but totally furious and very, very vulnerable as he becomes the last incel browsing. And that becomes our final live image as he turns the others off, he is now turned on by being the last one. It just feels, however, that it might not be the last time we hear of him ever again. And that feels very dangerous.
