A new play looks at the epidemic of raw, unfocused youth
By S.W.
IN EVERY city you see them. The young men with nowhere to go and nothing to do. They are not unique to London, or Paris or Rio; each country, unhappy in its own way, has its own means of production. They are the world’s problem demographic, caught between childhood and adulthood, care and responsibility, education and application. Wherever there is poverty and inequality, young men are waiting, ready to explode. Wherever there are cracks, they will be falling through them.
If raw, unfocused youth poses a danger to society, it also poses a threat to art. Inarticulacy isn’t easy to articulate; apathy hardly inspires. The perils are those of adolescence itself: clumsy expression, uncertainty and the sad inevitability of aging.
Happily, Leo Butler’s new play “Boy”, at the Almeida theatre in Islington, London (itself a scene of marked social inequality), does not suffer these issues. Mr Butler and his director, Sasha Wares, working closely with a predominantly teenage cast, have captured the slouch and slang of the language, not to mention the bustle and anonymity of London, thanks in large part to the play’s set—an ingenious revolving conveyor belt set, onto which cast and scenery appear and disappear. Here is a bus stop, here is a drunk – it is London as the world’s worst sushi restaurant.
The play hones in on a young man called Liam, who lacks drive and focus. Brilliantly played by newcomer Frankie Fox, Liam is the personification of a lost soul. His speech is composed almost entirely of likes and yeahs and similar phatic parts of speech. His wishes echo those of whoever he is speaking to. His eyes, usually furtive and wandering, flash dangerously when cornered.
We watch Liam malinger at a sexual health clinic, scavenge the discarded chips of schoolchildren and masturbate in a public park. He moves among the hordes of tourists on Oxford Street, drawing with his finger on dirty windows and kicking traffic cones. At the job centre he is told to come back when he is 18 and eligible for unpaid volunteer work. He sleeps rough, seemingly out of choice, though a reason is never given.
Liam has little in common with other contemporary portraits of youth, the grungy characters of “Skins” and “Misfits” who usually want something—even if that is to get wasted and do nothing. Instead, the play’s closest relative is Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”. The protagonist of “Boy” is something akin to a 17 year-old Estragon loitering outside Footlocker.
Who then, is his Vladimir, his Didi? The nearest equivalent is a nameless teenage dealer (played with a menacing swagger by Mohammad Amiri) who drifts on and off the conveyor belt, smoking marijuana and railing against yuppies and global conspiracies. This boy’s lack has crystallised into something hard and sharp, and the play suggests that Liam, with nothing better to do, may end up pursuing the same route.
“Boy” keeps Liam’s fate open-ended, without a decisive denouement; perhaps his confusion, anger and mumbled attempts at friendship are tragic enough.
But the play—and the production—faces a problem in that it can’t seem to decide who Liam is. A playwright can choose what he divulges about his characters, but he must know what there is to divulge. Over the course of the drama, Mr Butler’s near-total omerta on Liam’s history and home life begins to feel more like a bluff than an elegant and deliberate omission.
It is likely that an admirable intention lies behind this decision. The production aims for universals; it is a play about the Liam-types who haunt every city—the worldwide problem of the lost young man. Its language certainly translates. Mr Butler, with his gift both for language and loaded silences, gets as close as anyone has to the malaise and disenchantment of modern youth. Yet universals are told through specifics. If we are not given the details to understand Liam, the pathos of the story must depend on us not understanding him. That is a story too sad to bear.
“Boy” will be showing at the Almeida Theatre until May 28th 2016
