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Truth about men and marriage
THE THINGS GOOD MED DO
Old Red Lion
FAST-PACED and accessible, Dan Muirden’s debut full-length play is steeped in dark humour and stomach-curdling honesty.
The opening scene sees the two central characters, Nick (Tom Harper) and Joe (Samuel James), bare-torsoed and boastful, playfully recalling one another’s past sexual conquests.
Clearly possessive of Nick, Joe belittles his friend’s new-found love for Lucy (Victoria Shalet). She is simply the woman who “you want to have your children”.
He taunts Nick with the idea that she might be his last girlfriend reminding him that “like a Darwinian wet dream, men become more attractive to the opposite sex with age”.
Joe appears chauvinistic and full of false braggadocio but it is Nick who lacks judgement. Approaching their 30s they now not only feel the pressure to prove their manhood but also to settle down to a family and a mortgage. Panicked and frenzied, Harper is a man obsessed with presenting a picture-perfect image of himself to the world whatever the consequences.
An experienced cast with LAMDA qualifications, television appearances (most notably Shalet of BBC series The Queen’s Nose), Shakespeare and film parts lend this quick-witted script a polished performance. Harper and Samuel portray an intense friendship built on lies and half-truths.
Susannna Fiore as lonely Italian Adriana steals the show. As Nick’s desperately insecure but lovely mannered ex-fling she represents a voice of honesty, however manipulative.
Signe Beckman’s ingeniously designed set utilises the actors as stagehands. A sliding door or nifty shift of an oblong box turns a home into a bar or a park into a messy bachelor pad.
A comedic, at times harrowing, portrayal of the pressures on men to act out masculinity and live up to their stereotype, Muirden depicts city life as emotionally void and rife with deception.
Until April 21
020 7837 7816
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