This Will End Badly (Southwark Playhouse)

The stage is bare apart from a single toilet placed in the corner of a white tiled floor. When faced with the set of This Will End Badly, you can’t help but feel that the play’s eye-catching title might actually be a warning.

And there are certainly moments in Rob Hayes’ visceral monologue about mental health that are very hard to stomach. Delivered at breakneck speed by performer Ben Whybrow, This Will End Badly railroads you into the worlds of three disturbed men who are all troubled in very different ways. One can’t leave the house – his OCD paranoia about dirt makes it hard to get near the front door. One has become so constipated after his girlfriend left him he has started hallucinating and the other is an American Psycho-esque sociopath woman-hunter, intent on scoring a conquest for the evening.

Each of them are portraits of people whose cries for help – both loud and more subtle – fall on deaf ears. Hayes shows us men struggling with what they are supposed to be: alpha male, emotion-resistant, dependable, reliable, smoothly rendered. But here there are cracks beginning to show.

Whybrow gives a forceful, riveting performance. In each of the characters he is a slightly different everyman, seamlessly transforming from one to the other with only the slightest change in tone, accent or stature. It’s a performance which will invariably remind you of a friend, a lover, a boy-next-door and as such makes it harder to watch.

Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK. It’s a stark, astonishing fact and it is one at the heart of Haynes’ play. The horror and hell of mental illness, how isolating it is, how totally disfiguring it can be, is placed slap bang centre stage. The three men, stuck inwardly facing their troubles, disappear into themselves. And when the shit really hits the fan – in both a literal and metaphorical sense – we’re left wishing someone had been there to stop it.

This Will End Badly runs at Southwark Playhouse until 6 February