Boys

Synopsis

What would you do if the look in some old guy's face told you that being young was as good as it ever gets? It's finals day for the Class of 2011. Benny, Mack, Timp and Cam are due out of their five bedroom flat tomorrow morning; five bedrooms, five chairs, four boys - and one hell of a party. Stepping into a world that doesn't want them, these boys start to wonder whether there's any point in getting any older. How will they find the fight to make it as adults? Tonight marks the end of an era. It's hot. And there'll be girls. Predict a riot.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 1 June 2012

Oh no, not another play about students making a mess in a flat? Er, yes, and a whole lot more, too. Something like a contemporary version of The Young Ones on riot alert, Ella Hickson’s fierce and funny Boys is the strongest indication yet of her emergent talent.

She’s pulling out all the stops in Robert Icke’s savage and beautifully detailed Headlong production, presented in collaboration with the High Tide Festival and the Nuffield, Southampton. The setting – and what a work of colourful chaos that is in Chloe Lamford’s superb design – is a five-man student flat in Edinburgh.

Well, it’s now a four-man flat, owing to a sudden departure, and a stranded girlfriend, Sophie, is finding consolation with one of the others. Mack and Benny are both at the university, while Cam is on the verge of a breakthrough as a professional violinist and wild man Timp, who works in a nearby restaurant, is...

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Latest User Review

steveatplays - 16 June 2012:

Seeing Danny Kirrane (so brilliantly loathsome in Jerusalem) lounging about student digs listening to music, while another character pops out surprisingly from a surprising place, immediately suggested to me that this would be another youth-oriented conversational state of the nation play, like Jerusalem. And in a good way, that is exactly what it is, expanding on Ella Hickson's previous work dealing with the diminishing expectations of today's young people. Like Jez Butterworth, Hickson knows her youthful dialogue and creates wonderful defined characters. Kirane's lethargic yet thoughtful Benny is very likeable here, and his amoral roommate, Mack, played flawlessly by a broodingly malevolant Samuel Edward Cook, is not. So I expected schematics when dealing with their conflict over a historical tragedy. But those schematics never materialise, phony conflicts are avoided, and all the characters are sketched with empathy and depth. So this emerges as a youth version of Jerusalem, a state of the nation that is less grand in it's scope, dealing with the plight of the young rather than the fate of everyone, yet equally well written and biting and insightful. All the other actors are wonderful too: Lorn Macdonald as an easily influenced conformist, Tom Mothersdale as a 30 year old human ostrich whose head is buried in a bag of drugs, Eve Ponsonby as a girl whose privilege has dulled her conscience, and Alison O’Donnell whose goodtime girl outer layer conceals a softer core beneath. A limited play that is otherwise excellent in every way....

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