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

FOUR PLAY

★★★

“Different Theatre holds its own; this is an ambitious play, and one they tackled well”

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – no mean feat for a cast of 4 – remains an engaging piece of absurdist metatheatre. Directed by Sam Chittenden, this production, though small, economises engagingly with Polonius puppets and Ophelia dolls.

For those who don’t remember their Shakespeare or their Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead follows the two eponymous characters. Whilst mere side characters and victims of Hamlet’s rampages in the source material, in Stoppard’s play, they are central figures, desperately trying to navigate existentialism, actors, and an unhinged Hamlet. They yap about biased coin tosses, a human Schrodinger’s Cat, and word games, until petitioned by King Claudius to suss out Hamlet’s odd behaviour. Thus, the double act begins listlessly plodding around Elsinore, meekly trying and failing to engage Hamlet in meaningful conversation. The only people they ever really engage with are the travelling players, who are always performing.

Eventually, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are shipped off to their death in England, where at least they won’t be made to watch any more theatre. Except the players are also on board. It’s a series of more and more unfortunate events.

Perhaps this play, which directly uses the source material of Hamlet, is undermined by the smallness of the venue. The narrative and progression of time seemed at odds with the space, though perhaps this was part of Stoppard’s surrealist agenda. That being said, with three acts and two intervals, the piece did drag somewhat.

This is a demanding play, requiring theatrical dexterity and total command of the language. The cast, though competent and agile in their multi-rolling, perhaps struggled with such demands. With its post-modernist conceits and snappy dialogue, it was a challenge to maintain momentum.

It did often feel clumsy, and played for laughs, rather than trusted as an innately witty and erudite piece of writing.

However, the actors were a cohesive bunch, especially Ross Gurney-Randall as the Player and Claudius. Ben Baeza and Morgan Corby as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were well-matched, and distinct in an Odd Couple-esque way. One addition was the employment of audience members during the play within the play. By dragging volunteers in to play the roles of Queen, King, and Uncle, Chittenden toyed engagingly with the politics of metatheatre. The downside of this, however, is it tipped the piece into pantomime territory, which is always a terrifying prospect.

It may seem a small point, but volume was a noticeable problem. Where Corby was a little too quiet, Baeza was consistently too loud. His projection, in such a venue, felt a little like an auricular assault. But they worked well together and maintained a decent rapport.

As an amateur production, Different Theatre holds its own; this is an ambitious play, and one they tackled well. It did, however, crave more soldering and slickness if it is going to tackle Stoppard.

FOUR PLAY

King’s Head Theatre

★★½

“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:

FOUR PLAY

FOUR PLAY

FOUR PLAY

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD

Drayton Arms Theatre

★★★

“Different Theatre holds its own; this is an ambitious play, and one they tackled well”

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD

Drayton Arms Theatre

Reviewed on 10th June 2025

by Violet Howson

Recently reviewed by Violet:

ROSENCRANTZ

ROSENCRANTZ

ROSENCRANTZ

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