Several companies on the GM Fringe make their programmes available only via a QR code, thereby participating in society’s shameful persecution of people too handsome and too intelligent to own a smartphone. Possibly to redress the balance Robin Cantwell’s Bad Moult concerns a character driven to distraction by social media and his mobile phone.
Greg Roach (sole performer Colin Connor) has reached his lowest point and now resides in a commercial waste wheelie bin. He does not regard the bin as simple accommodation but treats it as a pulpit from which he can convey, to surprisingly large crowds, his evangelical message of failure. We are, he opines, all destined to end up in the bin; he just got there first. As Roach preaches, however, he cannot help but look back on the events which lead to his downfall.
In his teen years, Roach was best friends with Scuzz, a jack-the-lad whose get-rich-quick schemes never came to fruition. In adulthood, the friends took different paths, Roach taking a conventional move into marriage and a nine-to-five job and secretly admitting to himself he feels validated doing so when he sees how his friend’s shady projects continue to fail. It never occurs to Roach Scuzz might harbour resentment until, having hit it rich with Bitcoin, he gloatingly harasses Roach via social media, creating pressures which facilitate his fall from grace.
The script may concern a character at the lowest point in his life, but author Robin Cantwell aims high. Roach is more a messianic than Falstaffian figure; he compares the bin in which he lives to Napoleon’s exile to Elba and wears a fast-food container as a crown. In a sweepingly lyrical sequence, Roach mediates on how Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon, coped (or rather failed to cope) with being so close to the ultimate fame only to end up regarded as second best for the rest of his life.
Colin Connor’s take-no-prisoners performance contrasts with subtle direction from Oliver Hurst. It takes some time to notice, as Roach sinks deeper into despair, the lighting is gradually decreasing until, at his nadir, Roach is enveloped in shadow.
Colin Connor gives a completely committed performance, soiling his skin, scrawling on his torso, and even getting dirt under his fingernails. Connor opens in full hectoring roar as if he has just entered the theatre after hassling passers-by in Piccadilly Gardens.
But there is a terrifying self-awareness under the bluster. There is a sense Roach accepts he deserves to be mocked by his former friend. He compares himself to an insect incapable of shedding its skin properly and entangled in the discard. Despite his claims to have embraced his fall from grace, all of Roach’s reference points—he has taken the identity ‘Beetlebum’ after the song by Blur—are locked in the 1990s, the period when he was happiest.
More significantly, Connor behaves like the Heath Ledger / Joaquin Phoenix version of The Joker: someone who has not only recognised, but learnt to savour, the cruelties of life. Roach recalls, almost with admiration, his mother was constantly unfaithful to his father and, on her deathbed, apologised to the wrong man.
Bad Moult is a riotous, compelling play you feel uncomfortable watching but—like observing a car accident—cannot look away.