“Cullen is excellent as Ed, at once physically strong and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable”
Bones opens in the middle of a rugby match, bodies hurtling across the grassy stage. Actors grapple and slam each other to the floor, centimetres from the audience who are sat thrillingly close in the intimate Park90 space. Ed (Ronan Cullen) describes the thrill of a scrum, and it feels like the front row might be called up to flank the defence.
Bones invites the audience to become one of the lads, as it tackles mental health and masculinity within a rugby club. The plot follows a young man, Ed, who is isolating himself from his close-knit team. His mates, including level-headed Charlie (Samuel Hoult) and the swaggering Will (Ainsley Fannen) grow concerned at his erratic behaviour but struggle to communicate outside of jabbing pub banter. As a crucial match looms, Ed’s interactions with his friends, a doctor and his father suggest a more serious unravelling.
Cullen is excellent as Ed, at once physically strong and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable. James Mackay completes the ensemble, responsible for portraying multiple minor characters who are depicted by adding different shirts over the rugby strip sported by the rest of the cast. The most significant of these is Ed’s father and Mackay and Cullen have a touching, tender closing scene.
Bones makes the most of theatre in the round, with the set a simple square of AstroTurf. The closeness of the audience emphasises the claustrophobia of Ed’s struggles: the proximity means you see every drop of sweat beading on the actors’ faces.
Lighting and two spartan benches are cleverly deployed to move scenes between the rugby field, the pub, and Ed’s house. A rugby ball spewing chalk is utilised creatively through the climax, though I did leave with my trousers spotted with white powder.
The production is from Redefine, a company co-founded by ex-athletes and theatrical movement practitioners. This partnership reaps benefits in affrontingly physical match sequences that illustrate the parallels between Ed’s physical and mental pain. This is the piece’s second outing after a run at the Theatre Peckham in May 2022. It has been extended to 75 minutes and has an updated sound design (Eliza Willmott). Atmospheric synths back intense, acrobatic scenes, though actors occasionally lose the battle to make sure every line is heard.
The writing is worth straining to hear, with Lewis Aaron Wood’s script regularly serving up belly-laugh one-liners, especially for chief jester Will. This character’s transformation is one of the more interesting strands within the play; his early ripostes encroach on bullying territory, though he is the first to learn how to engage with crisis-mode Ed. Fannen deftly navigates this complexity so it does not jar. He delivers one of the most poignant lines: he challenges the generally more sensitive Charlie as to whether Charlie should want to be proven right, or let a contentious point go to support a friend. Moments like this elevate the piece, which sensitively explores the frustrations of engaging with those facing mental health struggles.
The conclusion of Bones may be too sentimental for some, with the optimistic ending avoiding the grittier reality of mental health care available within the UK. However, Redefine have stated their ambition to show recordings of Bones to rugby clubs across the country, where the play’s hopeful message is likely most novel.
There is enough sporting pedigree behind the show to ensure irregular theatre goers should not feel patronised by theatre creeping on their turf, whilst the quality script, strong direction from Redefine co-founder Daniel Blake, and intense physical performances give a thespian crowd plenty to enjoy.
“a workable and reasonably successful ensemble production”
This production from Lazarus Theatre Company reduces Shakespeare’s longest play to a concise one hundred minutes, performed without an interval, by axing all the adult characters. No Claudius, no Gertrude, no Polonius…
The work was initially created as part of an actor in training programme, and the production fails to escape these origins. It still looks and feels like an actor’s workshop rather than a finished piece of theatre. Part of this is deliberate: the setting is an unspecified young person’s space: part drama studio, part therapy group, part corrective training establishment.
The theatre space (Designer Sorcha Corcoran) is stripped back to its black walls exposing the lighting bars, the floor is scuffed with just some fresh blue lines marking zonal space providing some colour. A circle of blue plastic chairs and two props cabinets are the only set. The lighting (Designer Stuart Glover) is often blue too giving some ambience, whilst brighter light from the side bars causes shadowing issues.
An ensemble of nine actors is summoned into the circle by the ringing of a bell. Everyone is dressed in blue sweatshirts, tracksuit bottoms and training shoes. Each is invited to tell their story by an unknown amplified voice (Micha Colombo). This is the method by which Shakespeare’s plot is moved forward; at key moments the voice informs the young people of activities by the missing adults, or of offstage action not seen (“Hamlet has killed Polonius”). The amplified voice becomes an unseen presence with characters looking fearfully upwards, knowing that everything they do is observed. Is this voice then a helpful counsellor or Big Brother?
Central to almost every scene, Hamlet (Michael Hawkey) dominates the action. The remaining ensemble is pushed to the cramped sidelines, slightly but not completely out of the light. Hawkey grows into his role as the play progresses, but the need for speed often impairs the clarity of his diction. Noise from the wind machine and electronic sound effects mask the spoken word in the appearance of old Hamlet’s ghost – although Horatio (Alex Zur) boasts some fine vocal quality – and the occasional use of a handheld microphone with its inherent pops and bangs jars, particularly in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The effectiveness of choral speaking during the Ghost scene is also marred by the amplified sound.
Director Ricky Dukes keeps the actors primarily at a distance as if intimacy between them is not permissible. Hamlet interrogates Rosencrantz (Amber Mendez-Martin) and Guildenstern (Raj Swamy) from the full width of the stage, and again when Hamlet berates Ophelia (Lexine Lee) with “Get thee to a nunnery”. Lee plays her role in an effectively calm manner. When she leaves the stage pursued by a handheld camera, TV screens show her movement through the backstage corridors to her untimely and bloody end in a toilet cubicle.
A comic Players’ scene (Kiera Murray and Juan Hernandez) is nicely done and Kalifa Taylor shines in her lone dramatic rendition. Laertes (Sam Morris) lacks sufficient anger on hearing of Ophelia’s fate but a slowmo sword fight (Fight Direction Alice Emery) between him and Hamlet provides an effective way of staging the final scene.
What is achieved then in this radical rethink of how to present Hamlet is a series of vignettes held together by the framing device of the Voice. This cast, the majority of whom are appearing in their first professional production, all require a little more polish and the production is rather rough around the edges. Considering the loss of so many key roles, though, Lazarus has produced, perhaps surprisingly, a workable and reasonably successful ensemble production.
