It's all happening down at The Boar's Head, the small-town dive which local DJ Gary calls his local and where things might just be changing forever beyond the mannequins throwing shapes behind frosted glass.
Disco is dead and karaoke is the new king, leaving this every-chav refugee from Goldie Lookin’ Chain firmly out in the cold, with only his dream girl to chase. Would-be crooner Matthew D Melody, meanwhile, only has eyes for someone equally special, if only he could make her fall for him the way he obsesses over her. As for Russell Markham, even home comforts and domestic bliss can’t contain the overwhelming sense of guilt and frustration he feels about how he got so stuck.
As these three damaged young men’s worlds ever so obliquely collide, a far bigger portrait appears concerning what when Gary Owen’s play first appeared in 2001 was dubbed the crisis of masculinity. Over three monologues that only eventually link up, Owen lets us peek into a low-rent world where dreams of leaving are thwarted at every wrong turn in what at first looks like some Alfie-esque rake’s progress for the X-Factor generation, where everybody’s a deluded legend. Yet, as things move beyond the wisecracks to expose very different kinds of performance anxiety in these off-key lives, Gary’s prophecy in the play’s opening moments sees events morph into some kind of mini Jacobean revenge tragedy.
The back-alley baroque of Owen’s Welsh-accented script is blessed with a trio of fantastically sustained performances from Colin Little, Martin McCormick and Kristian Phillips in Leann O’Kasi’s production that is unashamedly deep as well as macho.
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