Remembering Boy at the Almeida
Leo Butler has a new play about LSD, but the interview with him in The Guardian has really just got me thinking again about how absolutely devastating his play Boy was a couple of years ago. It was like a velociraptor pincher movement of devastating. On one side, the abject hopelessness felt by a generation of low-achieving school leavers being failed by successive neoliberal governments; on the other, the piercing loneliness of a boy with no friends.
One of the most striking things about the play — apart from a design which had all the action take place on a conveyor belt — was the inarticulacy of the central character. We’re so used to seeing characters on stage being dazzling brilliant or witty or cruel or just simply perceptive, but the boy at the middle of Boy was none of those things, he wasn’t even especially confused. It was more… blank than that. A mixture of genuine naivety, and the kind of bravery which is necessary in order to navigate life but often shows itself in men as a shrug, a practiced unbotheredness.
At the time it was one of those plays which people saw and liked, but it never punched into that super-level of discourse, either on or offline. It’s possible that’s because it left many of us with this lingering sadness, rather than a need to interpret and contextualise. I left the auditorium feeling deflated; not with the show, just with, y’know, the weight of everything in the world.
Two and a half years later I think of it fairly regularly. I’ve just googled Frankie Fox, who played the boy (his professional stage debut) and he mainly does film and telly now. He’s played Johnny Rotten apparently. I should probably watch something else he’s done, because at the moment whenever I think about him my heart pretty much breaks in two.