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
Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:
REMYTHED | ★★★★ | May 2025
THE GANG OF THREE | ★★★★ | May 2025
(THIS IS NOT A) HAPPY ROOM | ★★★ | March 2025
FIREBIRD | ★★★★ | January 2025
LOOKING FOR GIANTS | ★★★ | January 2025
LADY MONTAGU UNVEILED | ★★★ | December 2024
HOW TO SURVIVE YOUR MOTHER | ★★★ | October 2024
TWO COME HOME | ★★★★★ | August 2024
THE PINK LIST | ★★★★ | August 2024
ENG-ER-LAND | ★★★ | July 2024
