REVIEW: Boys on the Verge of Tears by Sam Grabiner – Fortyfive Downstairs


“And one man in his time plays many parts.

His act being seven ages.” William Shakespeare

There’s a scene early on in Sam Grabiner’s award-winning play, set in a men’s public bathroom, that hews close to the arc of the 'seven ages of man' speech from As You Like It, where the five-actor cast are teenage boys in a school bathroom. It’s shocking, unvarnished and filled with the vilest misogyny. One boy goes into a stall to masturbate over his history teacher. Another, desperate to fit in, tells three of the worst jokes you’ve ever heard. They talk about the girls only as possible conquests. It’s confronting and all too real. I was a teenage boy. I’ve heard those conversations. And those jokes.

The next scene is a two-hander, two of the boys left alone, one talking in great detail about having sex for the first time and with revelation, it becomes clear it’s a story of non-consensual sex. He raped this girl and he talks about the night as if it was the best thing ever. His school mate never confronts him, though he keeps him talking, prompting him to reveal enough that we know what happened, even if he never does. No talk of consent. No talk of going too far. No interrogation of how drunk she was, even though they were both very drunk.

Back-to-back, these scenes paint a realistic and ugly portrait of pubescent boys already ground up by the patriarchy and stained by toxic masculinity. It was a lot. One audience member walked out. I was worried that the play was just holding up a mirror, inflicting the worst instincts of boys and men on us, without much more to say.

But Boys on the Verge of Tears is weaving a tapestry of men’s experiences that casts those awful teenage years as a making of something that can be broken away from, but never totally left behind. Even in the earlier scenes – a young boy being coached to go to the bathroom by himself for the first time, two kids at a birthday party playing with a knife, some fifth graders getting ready to go to a dance with girls – which are much less confronting, are sewing disastrous seeds for later life.

Not that the play is a linear narrative about the same five boys and men. The press release tells us that the five actors are playing forty different characters, coming in and out of a dirty, graffitied bathroom at school, at a sports club, in a pub, in a club. But you could patch together a kind of life story from the repeated incidents throughout the show, with imagery of costumes and dressing up and pretending to be something you’re not and accidentally pissing on yourself, as recurring motifs of men’s lives.

Production team, The Maybe Pile, who presented Trophy Boys at Fortyfive Downstairs a couple of years ago, have returned to the same theatre with the other side of the same coin. Where Emmanual Mattana’s play explored the privilege of middle-class boys from a queer perspective playing with gender and form, British playwright Grabiner is concerned more with scorching us through white-hot realism.

Ben Andrews' immersive set design – tiled floor, surrounding a long trough sink, urinals at one end and heavy stall doors at the other – drops us into the world. The audience has to walk through the stall doors to take our seats. To the degree it looks real, we are thankfully spared the stale smell of urine to top it all off.

Director Keenan Bragg has designed the production to play in traverse. We’re surrounding these boys, watching them, judging them and occasionally clocking the shock, surprise or laughs of our opposite audience members. Bragg keeps the show rolling along for 100 minutes by blurring the scenes together, even when one doesn’t lead directly or neatly to the next. Even when we might want to sit with the drama or comedy of one scene for even just a beat, we are onto the next thing. Life just keeps barrelling along.

Sound designer and composer Ethan Hunter has to be agile, nimbly changing from subtle background noise to the overwhelming racket of a nightclub – without simply replicating loud music. As one character says, you go into a club bathroom for escape, but the beat goes on. Later, one character is suffering concussion and isn’t really sure where he is or who he’s with and the soundtrack feels like a rapid heartbeat in our ears.

Georgie Wolfe paints this static space with bright whites and an array of colours, helping us the feel where we are, even if from scene to scene we might be as lost as the characters. Louisa Fitzgerald’s costumes are simple and iconic in equal measure; we are tipped off to who these men are by the way they clothe themselves. It’s an essential part of the text. Clothes might maketh the man, but the man inside might well want to rip it all off.

The show doesn’t work without a solid ensemble cast, though. Each actor needs to find their way from boy to men in a variety of guises, crafting a whole array of fully-realised characters. The stand-out work comes from Justin Hosking and Damon Baudin, though.

Hosking begins the show as the dad taking his kid to the toilet and ends as an old man with a colostomy bag. The contrast in those performances was enough to impress, but he’s also hilarious as a school boy dressed as James Bond and suitably creepy as an old-guard gay who is taking advantage of a hurt man in the club toilets. Hosking is the oldest actor of the group and he brings a gravitas to the stories of ageing and times-sped-by. 

Baudin begins in an adorable tiger onesie, but remains consistently compelling as he creates dirtbag boys and lost men, unable to articulate their feelings. Yes, these men may have been raised to push things down and keep on going even when things are tough, but as the title of show says, the patriarchy keeps many of them on the verge of tears. Baudin’s final scene, played with him barely saying a word, is a masterclass in holding the audience’s attention with intricate body language and an expressive face.

Boys on the Verge of Tears is a wild mix, a portrait of men on the edge, without easy answers. It occasionally falls into shocks for shock’s sake, but even that doesn’t undermine the truth of any of these vignettes or anecdotes. I wasn’t just on the verge of tears at the end, I was crying. The show snuck up on me, by being honest about men’s penchant for violence and capacity for real emotion. It talked about physicality, sexual desire, compassion, and the expectations on men in far more interesting ways than I expected after the earlier blunt, confronting scenarios.

The Maybe Pile has another hit on their hands. It might not be as radical in style as Trophy Boys, but it’s impressive in the portraits it paints and the movements it makes. And the work of the ensemble of actors is truly thrilling.

Boys on the Verge of Tears is on at Fortyfive Downstairs until March 30 

Photos: Ben Andrews


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