Reviews – Page 8 – Catherine Love

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lyric Hammersmith

Posted on March 4, 2016April 25, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

I was ready to give up on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In fact, I pretty much had; after the last uninspiring production, I made a personal vow not to see it again for at least five years. It’s just too familiar, its contours too well-trodden. I studied it multiple times, acted in it at school, saw production after gimmicky production try to put a new sheen on it. I was done, I decided, with fairies and mechanicals.

So I surprised myself slightly by going to Filter’s version at the Lyric Hammersmith. I think it was the words “riotous” and “irreverent” that appealed. And never has marketing copy been so spot on. Filter don’t just rip up the text – they douse it in beer and pelt it with food. It’s Shakespeare meets panto meets Secret Theatre.

Filter, together with directors Sean Holmes and Stef O’Driscoll, have latched onto the play-within-a-play conceit, playfully multiplying the meta-theatrical frames. At the start of the show, Ed Gaughan’s Peter Quince steps out between the curtains to say a few words – a prologue, if you will. There’s a special guest playing Bottom tonight, he excitedly tells us after some hurried preliminaries. But when said special guest gets stuck backstage shortly after, it’s up to a game audience member to step up and save the day.

So this Dream is a play within a play within a play, and Bottom is actually an unprepossessing (if enthusiastic) amateur, jumping up on stage with shopping bags in tow. Except, of course, he’s not. This is scripted chaos. Yet the extraordinary thing about Filter’s production is that, for all the knowing meta-theatrics (and despite being a remount of a production first staged in 2011), it manages to retain a feeling of real seat-of-the-pants improvisation. As performers crash through walls or tumble down holes, there’s a constant feeling that this could all go horribly wrong.

In that sense, then, it’s absolutely in keeping with the clumsy craft of the mechanicals, who here become Gaughan, his backing band and their last-minute Bottom (Andrew Buckley). They’re just about holding together both the fiction of the show as a whole and the play within a play that exists inside it, easily flipping between Shakespearean dialogue and twenty-first-century colloquialisms. Elsewhere, there’s a lycra-clad, cape wielding Oberon (Jonathan Broadbent), a poutily unimpressed Titania (Cat Simmons), and four of the most demonstratively lustful lovers the play has ever seen (special mentions to John Lightbody’s hip-thrusting Lysander and Hammed Animashaun’s soulful, Marvin Gaye-style wooing as Demetrius).

Filter also have a unique take on Puck, played here by the company’s co-artistic director Ferdy Roberts. No airy sprite, Roberts is instead a scruffy, sardonic handyman, keeping the wheels of Oberon’s enterprise rolling through elbow-grease more than magic. It’s a nod to the hard work for some that usually sits beneath the fun of others, though this Puck also gets his fair share of mischief. Cracking open cans of Fosters, he lets the lovers’ quarrels unfold like a soap opera, watching on with a grin and only reluctantly intervening to undo the mess he has made.

Like Dmitry Krymov’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) – another twist on Shakespeare’s play that has little interest in the text – Filter reveal to us the magic, the trickery and the silliness of theatre. Sound plays an important role here: the supporting fairies are nothing more that zooming, zipping sound effects, yet still you want to follow the noise in spite of yourself in hope of snatching a fleeting glimpse. Everything is mixed and produced on stage, but the absence of illusion only makes it all the more theatrical. Look, Filter say, this is how it all works – and still we as an audience want to be taken in by it.

The stalls are full of teenagers on the night I attend, and I find myself wishing I’d been taken to Shakespeare like this as a schoolkid. It’s full of joyous, ridiculous moments: spontaneous bursts of song, Oberon descending from above on a wire, a rapidly escalating food fight. And unlike any of those other productions I’d seen, this Dream feels full of life. Filter are irreverent when it comes to following the letter of the text, perhaps, but they create a theatrical experience with all the fun, mischief and pandemonium that the cheekiest of Shakespeare’s plays seems to demand.

Photo: Tristram Kenton.

Resolution Review

Posted on March 3, 2016April 25, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

This year I was lucky enough to be one of the professional critics taking part in the Resolution Review programme alongside Resolution, The Place’s annual showcase of new choreography. See below my reviews, originally published here.

12 January

Subhash Viman Dance Company Shan
Wayward Thread Finding Words
MAZPOD Rhythmic Stories Mad Meg

Under a single light bulb, Subhash Viman writhes restlessly on the floor. Limbs trembling, contorted, he is like a man learning to inhabit his own body. It’s a sense of searching that knits together the otherwise disparate triple-bill on the third night of Resolution 2016. Drawing on the ancient Chinese poem San Zi Jhing, Shan contrasts these jerking, shuddering movements with the fluidity and control of learnt gestures, suggesting the forces that society exerts on the body. Though the progression of the piece fails to match its startling opening, it’s a showcase for an astonishing talent in the form of Viman.

The evening’s second offering, to borrow its title, is Finding Words – or, rather, struggling to track them down. The programme note promises an exploration of ‘the urgency of language’, but there’s little that is urgent about Wayward Thread’s muddled piece. In a disjointed series of sequences, break tussles with contemporary dance, as the red-swathed company of seven creates shapes and images that struggle to speak to one another. There are occasional, tantalising hints of the epic, but the work as a whole never quite discovers what it’s looking for.

Closing the night in riotous style, Mad Meg is a search for its eponymous protagonist. Fragmenting and subverting the fairytale genre, this marriage of dance, narration and live folk music reclaims the story of a woman serially ignored. Defiant, joyous and often brilliantly grotesque in its use of movement, MAZPOD’s feminist fable is also bags of fun. It helps that performers and choreographers Marianne Tuckman and Phoebe Ophelia Douthwaite have a fizzing onstage chemistry, reminiscent of sparky physical theatre duo RashDash. The structure needs some work and the storytelling lacks clarity at times, but with energy and wit like MAZPOD’s such flaws are easy to forgive.

26 January

aKa Dance Theatre Company Next Door
Poekert & Bysheim oh, and one more thing…
BAMBULAproject Building the Route Between Me and You

As the lights come up on Next Door, a sofa sits centre stage. It’s an item of furniture that suggests staid living room dramas, but aKa Dance Theatre Company transforms it into a third player in this compelling study of one couple’s relationship. It pirouettes, tips on its side, embraces or ejects the two lovers who clamber over it. Throughout, Jennifer Grant’s playful and often surprising choreography tiptoes the fine line between flirtation and frustration. Curling their bodies around one another, Joe Garbett and Sally Smithson are teasing one moment, stony serious the next. Without words or even music, they suggest all the ways in which love can both make you soar and tug you painfully back down to earth.

In the second duet of the evening, Poekert & Bysheim’s oh, and one more thing…, the two dancers are held apart by rigid external structures. Stark shafts of light carve up the stage, restricting Sarah Poekert and Lisa Colette Bysheim to their own small portions of space. Beginning with micro-movements that gradually expand outwards, the two performers push at these boundaries, seeking fleeting moments of connection. The central idea, though, is more interesting than its stiffly repetitive execution.

Connection and disconnection are also key themes in Building the Route Between Me and You. BAMBULAproject are interested in how we piece together fragmented societies, a process represented visually on stage by a series of interlocking tiles. Sliding these tiles around the space and slotting them into different formations, the four dancers explore both isolation and togetherness. In one absorbing sequence, two of the performers create winding paths for their fellow dancers, slowly bridging the distance between them. While the dramaturgy of the piece as a whole would benefit from more clarity, at its best it speaks powerfully to how individuals connect and collide in the modern world.

12 February

Christopher Owen The Creative Act
Dillon Dance That’s Not How He Wants It
The Rebirth Network Behind Me

“The creative act,” as Marcel Duchamp famously asserted, “is not performed by the artist alone.” Art – and performance particularly – needs audiences to come to life. Opening the evening in baffling style, Christopher Owen’s new piece has taken Duchamp’s mantra to heart. Choreographing music, sound, video and text, as well as the movements of his own body, Owen creates an assault on the senses. The burden of meaning lies entirely with the audience. This, strange, puzzling piece acts as an association machine, its fleeting flashes of video and text daring us to make mental connections between disparate images and ideas.

Disparate is a word that jumps to mind again watching That’s Not How He Wants It. Individual sequences in Dillon Dance’s offering are all beauty and control. The female performers assume poses of fixed elegance, locked in place like ballerinas in jewellery boxes. In other scenes, they break free, their movements implying both strength and frustration. The title is suggestive of women’s roles in society and the extent to which these are still determined by men, but this theme is hinted at rather than fully realised, while the scenes themselves feel only loosely connected.

The clarity that’s wanting elsewhere is finally found in the night’s concluding piece, The Rebirth Network’s Behind me. This fusion of hip-hop, dance theatre and spoken word vividly evokes an inner world of competing voices and personal demons. There’s a rare dynamism and chemistry to this ensemble, who work brilliantly together to command the stage. Bodies convulsing to distorted beats, the performers create a haunting and compelling vision of hidden turmoil, all building to an urgent final message. Unlike the Rubik’s Cube that various company members grasp in their hands, dance is not there to be solved, but The Rebirth Network welcome audiences into the puzzle rather than locking them, bewildered, outside it.

16 February

Muti Musafiri ReFractions on Attachments
Richard Osborne rEd
Alula Cyr Hyena

There’s a lot going on in Muti Musafiri’s ReFractions on Attachments. Perhaps too much. Four dancers enter, eating oranges and reciting juice-distorted lines of poetry, before segueing into a series of movement sequences. One performer emerges, limb by limb, from between the legs of another. Bodies move fluidly in and out of frozen poses, limbs seemingly manipulated by external forces. The dancers race – flailing as though dragged – towards the audience, stopping at the last second. Such moments are individually stunning, and the talent and control of the quartet of performers is indisputable, but the connections between these scenes remain stubbornly opaque.

In contrast with Musafiri’s soup of ideas, Richard Osborne’s rEd is all simplicity. Billed as a duet about identity, it’s just that. Performers Brita Grov and Pola Krawczuk repeatedly come together and tear apart, fiercely tussling for a sense of individuality. Red and white hazard tape ties them together like an umbilical cord, pulled taut in striking images of struggle. “This is me,” Grov insists, mantra-like, trying to break free. The piece’s simplicity, though, is its weakness as well as its strength. Ambition has been sacrificed for the sake of clarity, never allowing this investigation of identity to go more than skin deep.

The individual and the group are also two of the central concerns of Hyena, Alula Cyr’s blend of circus and contemporary dance. The three female performers, like the animal of the title, move in a pack. As they execute a series of gasp-inducing acrobatics, the women also playfully explore group dynamics, as different individuals pair off or compete for one another’s attention and approval. This aspect of the piece, while intriguing, is not yet fully developed, and the skilful trio are at their best when rotating in wheels or turning unlikely somersaults. Ultimately, spectacle wins out over storytelling.

In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises), Gate Theatre

Posted on February 16, 2016April 25, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

As a child – like so many children – I was afraid of the dark. In those long nights when I was stubbornly holding my eyes open against the threatening gloom, my mum would read to me from Martin Waddell’s Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? In the book, Little Bear doesn’t like the dark. To Big Bear’s exasperation, he won’t go to sleep at night. What is he afraid of? Big Bear asks, again and again.

“The dark all around us,” he replies.

—

In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) unfolds a little like a storybook. Even its title has a fairytale ring to it. Once upon a time, Man and Woman (nameless urban archetypes) meet. On the street, maybe, or in a bar. They go on dates. He tells bad jokes. They fall in love.

And then they have a baby. A child is born – though, Nina Segal’s play insists, this isn’t a religious story. This child is just another child. And like so many children, it cries. The newborn bawls ceaselessly through the night, driving its parents to distraction. We join them in one narrow, dark sliver of one of these sleepless nights, as fatigued desperation gives way to hallucinatory fears. Slowly, inexorably, all the terrible things happening elsewhere in the world seep through the four thin, brittle walls of the child’s bedroom.

The two sleep-deprived protagonists are at once specific and generic. They’re both invested with just enough personality that we feel we know them a bit (she believes marriage is a misogynistic institution, he smokes though he knows he shouldn’t), yet they remain blank enough for us as audience members to project something of ourselves onto them. A bit like characters in storybooks.

Segal’s dialogue oscillates between third and first person, while performers Alex Waldmann and Adelle Leonce always seem to be both in and out of character at the same time, flickering constantly between narrating and representing. It feels vital that they don’t ever become too particular, too easy to dismiss. This is not just about them, in the same way that fairytales are never just about Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. This is for all of us who have brought or will bring or might bring another human being into this world. This incredible, broken, fucked-up world.

—

As a teenager, I devoured dystopian fiction. I wasn’t alone. Dystopias seem to strike a chord with those trapped, awkwardly, between childhood and adulthood – perhaps, as Laura Miller suggests in the New Yorker, because “the typical arc of the dystopian narrative mirrors the course of adolescent disaffection”. In all those scorched worlds, seemingly far removed from the one I was growing up in, I found something to identify with.

Those imagined apocalypses, though, have never quite receded as I’ve got older. They remain, somewhere in my own personal store of fears, multiplied by the threats of climate change, terrorism, mutating viruses. The dark all around us.

Again, I’m not alone. In a recent essay on Aeon, Frank Bures argues that the apocalypse has never been easier to imagine in the hyper-connected world that we currently live in, but that it’s also an age-old anxiety. “The apocalypse wasn’t coming,” he realises. “It was always with us.”

—

In Blasted, a war zone explodes into a Leeds hotel room, violence tearing through Western comfort and complacency. Though In the Night Time owes a considerable debt to Sarah Kane’s play, here the domestic chaos of the child’s bedroom is never completely ruptured by the horrors beyond its walls. Instead they intrude and then recede, and then intrude and recede again.

It’s a small space, the stage at the Gate, and director Ben Kidd exploits that. It easily becomes one of the too-small rented flats that families squeeze into across this city, filled with accumulating stuff. At the start of the show, the two characters and all the detritus of their lives are wrapped up in clingfilm. Tearing through this plastic membrane, birthed into the performance space, Waldmann and Leonce begin to construct the fragile lives of their characters. A picture frame here, a string of fairy lights there. All the things that we invest with the meaning of a relationship.

With a child, of course, comes more stuff. Even the baby itself, a plastic doll with a flashing alarm in its head, arrives in an Amazon box. And littered with all the familiar junk of infancy – nappies and bottles and plastic, so much plastic – the stage already begins to take on a disordered, calamity-hit aesthetic, while the two parents circle one another like enemies in a war of their own. All it then takes to bring fears of conflict, crisis and disease crashing into the room is for this precariously constructed space to collapse entirely, possessions flying like shrapnel.

“The two things are not connected,” the characters repeat again and again about different events – an insistent and increasingly desperate refrain. Of course, it only reinforces the reality that they are. Somewhere, far away, people are dying. Here, in a rented flat in an overpriced city, parents are placating their screaming child with “plastic sacrifices”. The two things are connected. Comfort in one part of the world depends on suffering elsewhere.

Bures suggests that now, in the globalised twenty-first century, the nature of our apocalyptic visions has changed:

“Today our fears are broader, deeper, woven more tightly into our daily lives, which makes it feel like the seeds of our destruction are all around us. We are more afraid, but less able to point to a single source for our fear. At the root is the realisation that we are part of something beyond our control.”

This pervasive, unsettling fear is what reverberates through Escaped Alone, Caryl Churchill’s latest, compellingly strange play at the Royal Court, and it’s also what reverberates through In the Night Time. The Man and Woman feel acutely that imminent destruction is everywhere around them, but they feel powerless to fix whatever it is that has broken. Catastrophe and everyday life, meanwhile, are so closely knitted together that neither can overcome the other. The war zone never obliterates the child’s bedroom. The end of the world is both there and not there.

The apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s always with us.

—

As an adult, inching ever closer to 30, it starts to feel as though babies are everywhere. Facebook is suddenly full of them: a whole timeline of chubby cheeks and dimpled smiles. Female friends without kids begin, for the first time, to plan their lives within a slim reproductive window. At the same time, news headlines seem to scream the foolishness of bringing a child into a world fraught with so much violence and crisis and pain. Still, there’s only so much time, the world keeps reminding us. Tick tock. Better make your mind up.

—

Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs cleverly stretched out one couple’s conversation about whether or not to bring a child into the world, revealing how a private decision is also one of agonisingly public responsibility. What justification can there possibly be for placing another carbon footprint on an already overburdened planet? In the Night Time is, in some ways, the “after” version of that play. This couple have already had a child – “for all the right reasons,” they assure us – but are left wondering if in fact they’ve made a terrible mistake.

Both play and production occasionally strain this point. The repetitive rhythms of the play’s speech are apt, echoing both storybook narrative convention and the circular arguments of denial that so often greet situations of crisis, but they can also begin to grate. After the first wave of chaos, meanwhile, the staging gives itself few places to go. Waldmann and Leonce must simply pick their way through the plastic rubble of the set, an image that gradually loses its power as the piece goes on and the momentum begins to slow. With the exception of a tinny chorus of toy sounds, playfully reinforcing the ridiculousness of this plastic shrine the two characters have erected to their child, the second half of Kidd’s production never quite matches up to the first.

In its evocation of present anxieties, though, In the Night Time is pretty damn potent. I might not have a child of my own, or be thinking about bringing one into the world any time soon. But those fears, that feeling that we inhabit a broken world and that – even worse – we are all selfishly failing to fix it, get me right between the ribs. Segal and Kidd manage to create the uneasy feeling that apocalypse is always right round the corner and that we as flawed human beings are each at once responsible and helpless. In the end, the show suggests, all we can really do is confront that dark all around us, waiting and hoping for the dawn to break.

Photo: Bill Knight.

Escaped Alone, Royal Court

Posted on February 10, 2016March 11, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

It’s not just the tea that’s brewing in Caryl Churchill’s new play. Beneath the sharing of a nice cuppa, something much nastier is simmering away. While four older women sip from their mugs in a sun-bathed garden, premonitions of catastrophe lurk behind their innocuous chit-chat, breaking through in pitch-black interjections. Over the course of less than an hour, the world ends seven times over: with floods, with disease, with fire. Sugar, anyone?

Escaped Alone is a bristling, baffling thing. Running at a brisk 55 minutes, it’s somehow huge and minute all at once. Compared with the formal somersaults of some of Churchill’s previous work, though, the structure is deceptively simple. It’s split into two alternating parts: in one, old friends Sally, Vi and Lena drink tea with neighbour Mrs Jarrett in Sally’s garden; in the other, Mrs Jarrett steps out of the frame of this scenario to deliver bleak missives from humankind’s downfall. Or, as the Royal Court’s blurb pithily puts it: tea and catastrophe.

Churchill’s title is borrowed from the Book of Job (“I only am escaped alone to tell thee”), and there is something oddly Biblical about this play, with its visions of apocalypse and its undercurrents of allegory. Linda Bassett’s affable yet enigmatic Mrs Jarrett plays the unlikely harbinger of doom, sent to warn us all of out-of-control, man-made catastrophes. Or perhaps warn is the wrong word, as these various Armageddons are all relayed in the past tense, laced with the bitter tang of inevitability. There is nothing to be done.

There are nightmarish touches of brilliance to these imagined disasters. In one, we are told – with characteristically surreal Churchill flair – that “the chemicals leaked through the cracks in the money”. Another conjures a world in which food is siphoned off to television programmes, leaving the general public to starve in front of cookery shows. There’s visceral horror, in images of survivors trapped alone underground and people eating rashers of their own fat, knocking up against inky dark humour – even if the gags do feel a little easy at times, airdropping in wry topical references to selfies and property developers.

Churchill is having no less fun in the garden-bound half of the play, in which her female quartet execute scenes of meticulously choreographed gossip. They chat about their grandchildren, about their pasts, about what superpower they’d like to have. This chorus of banalities is all delivered in distinctive Churchill half-sentences, clipped and careful. There’s clearly a shared vocabulary among these old friends. And again it’s rich with terrific moments. In one sequence, the women simply sing The Crystals’ hit “Da Doo Ron Ron” and it’s an absolute joy. Each character also takes their turn to break from the conversation and segue into a strange, disturbing monologue. It’s Sally’s inner voice that startles most, spilling out a breathless and absurd speech about her debilitating phobia of cats. Delivered with mounting intensity by the excellent Deborah Findlay, shoulders rounding protectively while hands nervously flutter, it’s one of the show’s highlights.

It’s the join between the play’s two halves that is more troubling – both interestingly and frustratingly so. You could say crisis and tea are never far apart, but otherwise the relationship between garden and apocalypse is left deliberately opaque. James Macdonald’s taut production at once maintains this ambiguity and gestures towards possible links. The small pauses in conversation – subtle and precise – suggest something more beneath the chatter. Miriam Buether’s design, meanwhile, has more than one nod to the void opened up by Mrs Jarrett’s bleak interludes. The garden, overgrown and vivid and lit by a bright, warm glow, is a sort of idyll, but there’s an odd emptiness to the grey-blue skies above that makes it feel as though it could be the last green refuge in the universe. Looked at this way, its contrast with the blackness that engulfs the intervening scenes, intensified by a flickering red neon surround, seems less stark than it first appears. For all that, though, it’s hard sometimes to fight the suspicion that these are simply two interesting scenarios to riff on, and that the whole is given less attention than its (admittedly intriguing) parts.

Nonetheless, Escaped Alone is never less than watchable, thanks in huge part to its fantastic cast. Much has been made of the fact that this is a play for four women in their sixties and seventies – a demographic still seen with shameful rarity on our stages. While the swift running time means that we can only ever get shards of these characters’ personalities, they’re pretty damn fascinating shards, giving the actors plenty to work with. Alongside Bassett’s slippery Mrs Jarrett and Findlay’s cat-fearing Sally, Kika Markham does delicate work as Lena – introverted yet occasionally spiky (“I do get out,” she indignantly insists) – while June Watson peels back surprising layers in unexpected ex-con Vi.

If there’s anything that holds the piece together, it’s the incessant, latent fear of the present moment that we live in. The paralysing terror that Sally feels when confronted with the idea of cats and the wilful delusion that has become a coping mechanism (“I have to believe there are no cats. And then briefly the joy of that”) might well stand in for any number of twenty-first century threats: ISIS, climate change, global pandemics. Mrs Jarrett’s catastrophes, meanwhile, are a potent cocktail of ancient fears and very contemporary preoccupations. It can often feel that we are living in the end times – or perhaps just on the brink of them – a feeling that Churchill uncannily captures. This is, to quote REM, the end of the world as we know it.

Now then, who wants a cup of tea?

Photo: Johan Persson.

This Will End Badly, Southwark Playhouse

Posted on February 10, 2016March 4, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

The title of Rob Hayes’ latest play is a promise. This will end badly. And not just for the trio of troubled protagonists whose stories his fragmented, three-part monologue rapidly snaps between. The whole male sex, contorted under the pressures of modern masculinity, comes out of this badly. As his portraits of wounded, angry men make clear, it is not only women who suffer under the rigid, oppressive structures of patriarchy. Hayes’ prowling alpha male character, describing tactics for picking up women, puts it most succinctly: “it exists within a framework”.

The framework of the piece itself, however, is often unclear. It begins confusingly: performer Ben Whybrow, intense from the outset, rattles through the words at astonishing speed, clearly speaking from more than one perspective – but whose? Only gradually do three distinct (and sometimes less distinct) voices emerge. One man, reeling from a recent breakup, is suffering from a case of extreme constipation; it’s almost two weeks since his girlfriend left him and he still can’t take a dump. Another is trapped by different forces, confined to his flat by chronic anxiety and OCD, frantically turning switches on and off. And a third is on the hunt for casual sex, in the process of making his latest conquest. If the three are occasionally difficult to distinguish from one another, it’s surely deliberate. These three men represent three jagged shards of modern masculinity, all harmed and harming as part of the same, long-entrenched system.

The central scatological metaphor – immediately signalled by the toilet in one corner of Jemima Robinson’s otherwise sparse set – can’t be missed. A lot of shit has built up here, and it’s not so much hitting the fan as poisonously accumulating. The message may not be subtle, but it lands with force in Clive Judd’s relentlessly fast-moving production. These men are emotionally as well as physically constipated, blocked up by a world that tells them to control their feelings, to project confidence, to dominate others. What we see is a male culture that has little room for vulnerability or tenderness; a culture in which suicide – the statistics of which one character obsessively lists – might seem like the only way out.

There are points of meeting and overlap with Chris Goode’s furious, scaldingMen in the Cities, another collection of voices from men flailing under the violence of patriarchy. Next to Goode’s piece, though, This Will End Badly feels strangely incomplete, stating rather than interrogating its points and at times doing little more than replicating the abuse it examines. It is also, unlike Men in the Cities, overwhelmingly preoccupied with the predicament of the straight white man in today’s society, a choice that sharpens its focus but at the same time narrows its scope.

The pick-up artist – his monologue tellingly titled ‘Meat Cute’ – is in many ways the most interesting and the most problematic of the three men put on stage. He speaks in the plural first person, always ‘we’ and ‘us’, as if acting as a conduit for the entire gender. He could also be a conduit for countless opinion pieces and online comments about sexual politics and consent, mansplaining the media’s impossibly contradictory standards of femininity (“How do you even know what you’re supposed to want?”) and toying dangerously with rape apologism. Hayes’ introduction of these issues is blunt and bludgeoning, especially when knocking up against the humour elsewhere. When occupying this role, meanwhile, Whybrow often delivers lines directly to (always female, as far as I could tell) members of the audience, with an aggression that wavers between the ironic and the downright violent. It raises a serious question, especially with material that may be a trigger for some: when does a representation of harm become simply harmful?

This is not a question that This Will End Badly really attempts to address, instead using these difficult moments as part of its (admittedly formidable) critical arsenal. Still, it’s a disturbing and intense window on the twenty-first century man, its abrupt conclusion leaving behind a lingering sense of unease. The urgent implication, as the whole destructive cycle prepares to start again, is that if something doesn’t change then things will continue to end badly – again and again and again.

Photo: Ben Broomfield.