FOUR PLAY

King’s Head Theatre

★★½

“tackles some fascinating and thorny issues revolving around queer relationships, but its execution is shallow”

Question: ‘Did you ever sleep with anyone else, during the 7 (and a half) years we were together?’

Answer: I hated A Little Life

End Scene

What? That’s not profund? It just makes no sense.

Jake Brunger’s Four Play, as the name suggests, is about the colliding sex lives of gay couple, Rafe (Lewis Cornay) and Pete (Zheng Xi Yong), with Michael (Daniel Bravo)– the ‘hot one’ – and his partner, Andy (Jo Foster). It opens with Rafe and Pete propositioning Michael to sleep with both of them individually, so they can experience sex with other men, having only ever been monogamous with each other. Psst, don’t tell Andy.

Directed by Jack Sain, Four Play’s first act is promising, especially the allure of the opening sequence, in which the three men dance about with exercise balls. Michael quickly agrees to the proposal of one-time sex, and the play follows the devolution of the intertwined relationships between the four.

The second act, however, disintegrated more dramatically than any of the relationships. The primary diagnosis for Four Play is bad writing. Filtered through cliché, the characters are undeveloped which makes it near impossible to provoke interest in their sex lives and their secret liaisons. I don’t take pleasure in devaluing a play that confronts stereotypes about gay men, but this piece felt symptomatic of some of the most depressing facets of our epoch. Though there is ostensible exploration of the emotional tangle of queer open relationships, Andy – supposedly the injured party – is vapid and uncritical, cloaking ignorance with some worthy diatribe against the apparent pretentiousness of liking Ottolenghi and Chablis. That is one of the alarming facets: anti-pretentiousness. Anti-pretentiousness, in this case, is just anti-intellectualism promenading as social commentary.

The actors do their best with the material. Foster is spritely and contrasts well with Bravo’s aloof composure. Cornay is endearing in his awkwardness, also in contrast to the corporate soullessness of Pete. Set and costume design (Peiyao Wang) are highlights, especially Foster’s outfits. The interior décor is suitably chic and modern, complementing the piece’s tone.

The overriding message of the play, Brunger holds, is to respect your partner and always be honest. But there is no plausible redemptive arc for these characters, and they all remain objectionable. The relationships felt symptomatic of our societal objection to feeling and to difficult emotion in the name of ‘protecting our peace’. Not one of these characters have an engaged conversation: they just talk at each other and leave. No one is changed by the end.

Theatre doesn’t have to be radical or revolutionary, but it should be observational in some way; usually, it observes convention from an unconventional lens – in this case, we have sex, monogamy, and ‘modern’ relationships from a non-heteronormative lens. But it lacks nuance. The rusting away of a woman’s ovaries is casually dropped for humour; Hitler and Nazi uniforms as a kink are mentioned in poor taste; metaphors obscure rather than elucidate. At one point, Andy, with lustre, says ‘Spiders are scary. Terrorism is scary. Cancer is really scary. Monogamy?’ As if monogamy could only be held in opposition to these three wildly divergent examples of scariness and thus be deemed unscary. But monogamy can – and perhaps should – be intimidating, and that’s a fascinating discourse in itself, not to be undermined.

Four Play tackles some fascinating and thorny issues revolving around queer relationships, but its execution is shallow.

FOUR PLAY

King’s Head Theatre

Reviewed on 16th July 2025

by Violet Howson

Photography by Jack Sain

FOUR PLAY

AGE IS A FEELING at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★

“a beautifully constructed show, full of heart and heartbreak”

Haley McGee performs her new show, Age is a Feeling, a delicate, poignant, and ultimately – I think – uplifting piece of work about life, death and those moments in between; the one’s others remember us for, and the one’s no one ever really even knew about. McGee began developing the piece during the UK’s first national lockdown in 2020, and was inspired by interviews with hospice workers, as well as visits to cemeteries.

Zoë Hurwitz’s set is made of twelve tall, thin flowers, spread out in a circle, like the numbers on a clockface. Each one sits in a small plant pot. On each of the plants is a postcard, representing different stories from McGee’s life. (I should flag at this point that the show has a sort of autobiographical feel, but it’s not clear if any of this is actually from McGee’s life.) Throughout the performance, the audience chooses which of the six stories we get to hear, and which of the six will be left unheard. Some of the stories we hear tonight include ‘oyster’, ‘hospital’ and ‘crabtree’. We don’t tonight get to hear, for example, ‘fist’, ‘bus’, or ‘dog’. In the middle of the circle of plants and postcards is a tall, white lifeguard’s chair, which McGee spends a fair amount of time sat upon, narrating memories of her life which surround her. They’ve all already happened now, so she gets to look down on them as she narrates to us.

The stories begin at age twenty-five and journey through the human life until the point of death. Among them, we hear about broken hearts, relationships, family, grey hairs, backache and skincare. There is an emphasis on trying to live a life which goes against convention and, without ever becoming particularly sad about it, regrets or references to things we may have done differently. But also here is the feeling of inevitability. That it doesn’t matter if you know at aged twenty-five you should be eating more vegetables, drinking more water, exercising more frequently; it’s hard to make these changes when you’re young. You’ll make these changes ‘for a while’ and then move back to your old ways. The reception of ‘for a while’ at increasing ages makes us laugh at first; then it’s sad; and then it’s sort of funny again.

The show has a little bit of a slow start, but this plays to its benefit as McGee is able to gently and delicately build these layers upon layers of stories and memories, until before you know it she’s old, her friends and family are dying, as is inevitable, and we watch the life she’s built slowly decompose. Her performance of these stories is what makes them so extraordinary. Her voice is deeply controlled, soft, meditative, as it gently echos through the lecture theatre. Her eyes begin welling up, as she connects deeply with the audience, making it seem like these stories could belong to any one of us.

We spend so many years feeling anxious about what others think of us, and we make so many decisions or lose out to so many opportunities because of this; because we want to be popular or non-confrontational, and so much of this show is about grabbing life’s opportunities and jumping at them, being less afraid of what people will think of you because you only have one life. And once it’s gone, it’s just memories, stories told by other people. And ultimately, eventually, they’ll all be lost forever anyway. We take most our stories with us to the grave, so we might as well write them the best we can, when we can.

Tag Archives: Daniel Carter-Brennan

FOUR PLAY

★★½

King’s Head Theatre

FOUR PLAY

King’s Head Theatre

★★½

“tackles some fascinating and thorny issues revolving around queer relationships, but its execution is shallow”