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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2002 Reviews (5)Big Boys Don't Cry People just don't believe it. Wives beating their husbands? Rubbish! It couldn't happen! But of course it does: it's a fact - surprising but true - that men are as likely to be beaten by their wives as the other way round. Big Boys Don't Cry shows us how this can happen. Set in the 50s, it takes us through a marriage from the "first fine, careless rapture", through verbal and psychological abuse, to the physical assaults which reduce the man, played by writer Peter Machen, to a wreck. The set is very much in the style of a cartoon or a Hollywood movie of the period, all bright colours with a bright rising sun at the window. The furniture and appliances are larger than life, so that other rooms and even the train on which the husband goes to work, can be actually inside them. The Hollywood feel is reinforced by a Dennis Potter-like use of dance routines to Sinatra songs and very over-the-top "lovey-dovey" dialogue. To us, the audience, there are early warning signs of trouble to come as the wife, played by Rebekah Fortune, begins to organise husband, giving him the breakfast newspaper, the welcome home to slippers and pipe, and even insisting he goes to work by train, to conform to the image of the successful businessman. Of course, he isn't particularly successful, just a minor functionary in the office, but, due perhaps to his wife's pushing, he begins to work his way up through the ranks. Meanwhile they have the first of the planned two children. And this, of course, is where it all begins to go wrong: he's working longer hours; she's sick of being left alone for so long; he talks of nothing but work; she begins to suspect another woman... Cliché, of course, but then the whole play is built around clichés, and that is the whole point of the Hollywood image, the song and dance routines, the quasi-nostalgia 50s setting, for, although the clichés might suggest the possibility of an abandoned wife, or a husband whose interest strays, or many another possible storyline, the one thing they don't do is lead us to expect what actually does happen. The play subverts the cliché. It starts off very funny and the laughter keeps going for a long time but it becomes increasingly hollow and guilty as the time passes. It was a very thoughtful audience which left the theatre. A very thought-provoking production - it seems insensitive, almost cruel, to say that it's also very enjoyable! Peter Lathan Bedhead Two men and a girl share a flat. One man is a successful womaniser, the other isn't. The girl has a boyfriend who dumps her. They all share a passion for getting smashed on vodka. They go to the pub and have parties. They get very drunk and sleep late. Occasionally they have bad dreams. It's all pretty predicatable, really. There's one nice staging idea: a kind of rubberised fabric flap behind the single bed on the stage which enables cast members to slip in and out of the bed either seen or not by audience, depending on how obvious they want it to be. There's nothing to complain about in the performances nor in the production as a whole: it's just that there are many more worthwhile plays around than this one. Peter Lathan Jack Pleasure Terry is sick of his life as a coach driver: he wants to be a porn star. He's going to go to America and change his name to Jack Pleasure. He's 36 and still living with his dad, being separated from his wife Susan. "Only losers take the bus," he says, but Terry is the biggest loser of them all. He is contemptuous of his dad's continuing involvement in union activities at the cycle factory where he used to work until he retired, but his own life is no better. His job provides the perfect metaphor for his life, travelling the same ground day in, day out. He's at war with everyone - his dad, Susan, his Auntie Brenda (his mother's sister, who's having an affair with his dad) - but it's not a war of their choosing. They have accepted their lives in this small Midlands town which revolves around the on-the-verge-of-closure bicycle factory. He hasn't accepted: he has a dream, the dream of stardom as Jack Pleasure. It's a dream which we know is not going to be realised. It's an enjoyable piece of theatre, an examination of the life of someone who is ordinary, not content to be ordinary but unlikely ever to be anything other than ordinary. It has its moments of humour and of pathos. It's insightful, well performed and well worth seeing. Peter Lathan Project 9/11 Everyone will always remember where they were when they first heard of the events of 11th September. The students of the Playwrights Horizons Theater School certainly will, for it is located just a few blocks away from Ground Zero. Project 9/11 is the response of a group of staff and students of the school to those events, working together with acting teacher Elizabeth Hess. She saw the piece as being in three parts: the first scene would be monologues based on "visceral responses on the day", the second "a crystalisation of each actor's emotional statement, and the third the "gradual stirring to life as the actors rise out of the debris." The first scene, which takes up most of the play, is searingly effective, full of the raw emotion of the actors' immediate response - horrifying, occasionally (on the surface at any rate) inappropriate, and, in once case, almost surreal. This particular girl was devoured by a craving for a cigarette, to the extent that it became the sole motivation for her actions immediately after the disaster - and yet she doesn't smoke! I found scenes two and three rather weak in comparison and, frankly, rather cliché-ed. They are physical and basically involve collapsing on the floor (scene 2) and rising slowly (scene 3). I question whether they were, in fact, dramatically necessary. I'm sure they were for the cast, to bring about some kind of emotional closure, to enable them to see something positive arising from the horror, but I can't help feeling that, as a piece of theatre, Project 9/11 was weakened. Nevertheless, the reality of the piece, the range and rawness of the emotions, coupled with our own reactions to the events of that day, make this one of the most moving events of the Fringe. The audience was stunned and applause was hesitant, to say the least, until the cast had left the stage. Then it was loud and long. Peter Lathan |
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