THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★★
“an innocent, wondrous delight”
The Show for Young Men will not change the world. It doesn’t have an obvious “point”, or “message”, or even structure. But none of that matters. Because in its simplicity and tenderness, it touched my soul more than any other piece I’ve seen at Fringe.
The plot and setting are a singular, sustaining note. A construction worker is toyed by and toys with a young boy who has stumbled upon his site. That’s it. For the whole hour. The set (Rachel O’Neil) itself is simple: three carbon tubes of various lengths (all conspicuously small-child-sized in width), a few moving boards and a retractable ladder. With this starting tool box, the choreographers (lead artist Eoin McKenzie with choreographic support from Aya Kobayashi) concoct a whole world’s worth of playthings. Like a creative child not gifted store-bought toys, they turn their mundane objects into rockets and tanks and slides and every material facet of adventure. A personal high light of this ingenuity comes just after the halfway point. The construction worker, struck into a depression by his conflicted resistance to vulnerability and intimacy, has his pain illuminated by a small light shown through the circular boundary of the industrial tube. He is sung a song by his young counterpart, who it transpires, once the construction worker leaves, is directly in the line of the light. As such, he shines.
Indeed, this shining is accentuated by the wonderful talent and chemistry of the two performers. Robbie Synge plays the construction worker, and brings an evident vulnerability of masculinity desperately scratching to drag down a fundamentally playful, compassionate, wonderful heart. This vulnerability overtakes him sometimes, and the rift between the two this causes is damaging and profound, but it makes the resolution and rekindling all the more wonderful; a rekindling which is already highly rewarding due to the innocent joy that’s sparked between the two. Much of this joy is attributable to Alfie, more or less playing himself, the adorably cheeky but impressively organized 10 year old who sends Robbie into (somewhat voluntary) loops. Their chases around ladders and swings around (and into) industrial tubing bring out the inner child not just in Robbie but in all of us. In an age of cynicism, the overwhelming innocence and friendliness of their interactions are irresistible.
However, it’s after the resolution where the play really enters visionary territory, delving into more exploratory and stylistic sequences which highlight the wonder of shared struggle and the absurdity of bottling it up under the auspice of being ‘a man’. A joy shared is a joy doubled and sorrow shared is a sorrow halved: an idiom this play embodies to its every detail. Indeed, the aforementioned scene where Alfie sings “Half the world away”, a song written by an ex-construction worker as it happens, is massively powerful; an affectionate, calming melancholy that feels like a warm patch of sun striking one’s skin. Indeed, the technical aspects of the play are superb throughout. The lighting (Katharine Williams) is simple and largely diegetic, save for the occasional blackout, but the urban-auburn spotlights that visually reflect that sense of melancholic sunset, and the party lighting which accentuates the high-energy moments of the play, are perfectly executed. The sound design (Greg Sinclair) is perhaps even more creative and effective; a football podcast featuring Lineker, Shearer and Wright sets a day-to-day scene wonderfully, and its shift to pop songs and dance anthems at the bequest of Alfie is hilarious and joyful in equal measure.
The Show for Young Men is an innocent, wondrous delight. It shoves toxic masculinity’s face in the dirt without ever having to explicitly acknowledge it, by playfully illustrating the possibility for healthy, vulnerable, loyal relationships between any kind of man.
THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Assembly @ Dance Base
Reviewed on 23rd August 2024
by Horatio Holloway
Photography by Andrew Perry
THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN
THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN
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