The Man

Synopsis

Tax is really, really taxing for Ben Edwards. Self Employed. And afraid... And now he must face his dreaded self assessment form, with every receipt evoking the good times and the bad - memories of things gone wrong, gone right, the journeys he’s been on, the relationships that have begun and ended and the people he has lost... With each receipt drawn out at random, Ben begins to stitch together the patchwork quilt that was the Tax Year 2009/2010 - a year that was both hilarious and tragic, all mixed up in one shoe box of receipts.

Our Review:

8 June 2010

A little elf dances up and down in front of us: “Tax doesn’t need to be taxing! Tax doesn’t need to be taxing!” Well, it’s a man pretending to be an elf.

The man in question, Ben, is doing a very sweet elf impression that is at once adorable and tinged with desperation. He's the average Joe who shouldn’t get the stunner next door but somehow does, the nerdy lad who for some reason you want to impress. Ben, like all of us, hates doing his tax return and this time he's making it even more difficult by working through not only the paperwork of the last year, but the stories and emotions behind each printed piece.  We are being invited to peek into his life via his receipts

It is a raw and revealing journey: in this consumer driven world, what we buy really does define us. Ben’s roles as boyfriend, brother and son are questioned and tested; he seems resigned to his sense of failure in these mantles. It occasionall...

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Latest User Review

rds - 17 June 2010:

One star for the appalling conditions the management subjected the audience to tonight, it felt like 40 C in there. I should have been warned when taking my seat seeing a window wide open and the theatre still feeling like an oven, but no I was daft enough to stay and watch the last vestiges of any air shut out when the window was closed. I stuck it out for 40 minutes but had to leave, apologising to the wonderful Samuel Barnett on the way. How the theatre has the nerve to treat not only him but the audience to such conditions is beyond belief. Animals are treated better. The play is so so probably it would work better on the radio? It sounded that way with the other cast member a disembodied voice from behind. The device of having every member of the audience holding a receipt, which the character Ben played by Samuel Barnett, then chooses from has clearly been put in to spice it up. However, having left early I guess I can't comment too much only to say it was tedious in the extreme under the appalling conditions we were subjected to, but alleviated only by Samuel Barnett's fine acting - god bless him for sticking it out and 5 stars for that....

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