Boys on the Verge of Tears [Marc Brenner]

SAM Grabiner won Soho Theatre’s prestigious 2022 Verity Bargate Award for this exploration of boys, men and masculinity.

Boys on the Verge of Tears is set entirely in a public lavatory and features five actors, Matthew Beard, David Carlyle, Calvin Demba, Tom Espiner and Maanuv Thiara, playing 50 roles and various ages.

The drama opens with a father trying to toilet train his young son in a cubicle.

A pair of boys take time out from a kids’ birthday party and play with a kitchen knife. Teenagers plan their weekend and fights break out after a heavy night of drinking. It ends on a poignant note with a stepson helping his stepfather change his colostomy bag.

The bathroom proves a liminal space for boys and men to pass through or hang out.

For some, they can drop their façade and be themselves with sometimes ugly consequences.

Grabiner exposes the casual misogyny and cruelty of adolescents. One man is brutalised, another man’s act of kindness is treated with suspicion.

Humour drifts in with two drag queens in beards – Vanessa Feltz and Maureen Lip-Man.

Grabiner proves himself a talent to watch. He writes taut dialogue and the sense of menace he creates is, at times, distinctly Pinteresque. He’s well served by James Macdonald’s sure-footed direction, Ashley Martin-Davis’s versatile set and a terrific ensemble.

However, running at 100 minutes without an interval the play could have been tighter – watching someone clean the toilets is rather like waiting for paint to dry and the male preoccupation with bodily functions begins to pall after a while.

Until May 18
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