Boy Out The City
The Turbine Theatre • 9 November - 13 November
It was only going to be a matter of time before the effect of the lockdowns that have been peppered throughout this global pandemic was going to start filtering through to the work being created by artists, musicians and playwrights. How could it not, given theirs was a sector left hung out to dry more than any other by a government who, for so long during the crisis, resolutely refused to offer any kind of support other than an ill-advised, but thankfully short lived campaign suggesting people in the arts forget their years of passionate devotion to the industry and ‘retrain’ for jobs in I.T. It’s a subject that has cropped up many times over the last year in interviews with creatives conducted for Jack The Lad magazine, but we had yet to see it as a subject in queer theatre, making Boy Out The City one of the first plays out of the gate to deal with the effects of the last 18 months full-on in this self-penned one man show by Declan Bennett, (who some will no doubt recognise from recent itv detective drama The Long Call)
It is an impressive, highly autobiographical debut that draws on Declan’s own experience of getting caught up in the ever increasing nightmare of life in lockdown. There’s a lot of familiar territory here, given just how widespread the shared experience of lockdown has been, and the laughter comes thick and fast at first as we recognise a lot of Declan’s experiences from our own lives. The increasing ASOS delivery’s, the relentless cake baking, the wine bottle being opened a little bit earlier each day and rediscovering the joys of a long bath. (Come on, own up… it can’t just have been me and Declan!) The difference between this audience member’s experiences and Declan’s however is that he, along with his partner, decided to move out into the countryside. It doesn’t take long before the initial pleasures of that escape soon start to feel more like a prison sentence, the departure of his partner for a 6 month work placement abroad only further amplifying the feeling that life has ground to a complete stand-still.
We don’t have to wait too long before the play takes this altogether darker turn, and as time passes Declan’s more reflective manner slowly transitions into angst driven mania, and almost like a bad, hallucinatory trip we are taken back through events in his past where we discover a myriad of ghosts yet to be laid to rest. As the play progresses, so Declan’s demeanour shifts as he begins to prowl across the stage as if in a fever dream, his recollections of past events and the search for their meaning being both compelling and at times disturbing to watch. It’s a well measured, perfectly paced transition from the actor throughout the duration of the play, and whilst the staging here is minimalistic, the few set pieces are well chosen, and the music and lighting-design work well in transporting the audience through the various locations and times.
With a passionate delivery, the language at times drifts into the strangely poetic as he describes an unpredictable journey through a life that finds him wrestling with solitude, cancer, coming out and religion. Declan’s performance is a tour-de-force in raw emotion, but there are soon a lot of strands to keep up with, and it’s in these more frenetic moments that the clarity with which he has skilfully dealt with life in the here-and-now begins to get slightly lost. That being said, nothing gets laboured beyond it’s point of natural interest, which is an economy in writing that ultimately serves the play well.
Whilst we may not be able to say we are living in a post-pandemic world just yet, as a new piece of original writing Boy Out The City is an assured first look at life in lockdown, and how the time it left us to fill sometimes led us down reflective paths to muse upon where (and who) we are now, and the circumstances that brought us here. Fortunately for us, Declan also used this time to write these reflections down, and in doing so has created an honest, uncompromising and compelling first play.
★★★★
photographs: Colin J Smith Photography
