Boys on the Verge of Tears at Soho Theatre

We love Soho Theatre’s eclectic programming, and we’ve made the trip there on many previous Cog Nights for stand up comedy and cabaret shows. This April, we tried something different again, checking out new work from hotly tipped young writer Sam Grabiner, who recently won Soho Theatre’s Verity Bargate award for new writing. Our newest colleague Marta joined us for the trip, and we were delighted to have two of our remote team, Mark (web developer) and Luke (designer), in attendance along with the regular London-based studio crew.

Boys on the Verge of Tears is set entirely in a men’s public toilet. It’s a location that lends itself equally well to comedy and drama, and over the course of the play we see around fifty men and boys passing through in a series of overlapping vignettes, sometimes funny, sometimes scary and often sad. The five actors tasked with playing all these roles between them do an amazing job of capturing the unique emotional contours of each character, exploring a whole range of distinctly male neuroses and vulnerabilities.

All of these men and boys have problems, and the toilet is treated as a private space where they dare to let out their feelings without scrutiny from the outside world. Sometimes we sympathise, and other times it’s easier to feel disturbed or disgusted by the unfiltered thoughts that these men and boys express when their guard is down. They struggle with their identity, with their need to belong, and with their sense of self worth. These vulnerabilities are excruciatingly peeled apart in scene after scene:

At the beginning of the play, a father is toilet training his young son, and we immediately feel his sense of rejection and inadequacy when the boy demands his mum’s help instead. What’s the right way for men to nurture?

Later on, a male nurse tries to help a bloodied man he finds on the bathroom floor, but nothing he says can convince the man that he means no harm. What’s the right way for men to care?

Each character has their anxieties laid painfully bare, and for me the characters felt almost too authentic at times. When I watched, I couldn’t help thinking of all the men I know in real life who are just like the ones being portrayed on stage. There are moments of genuine comedy scattered throughout the play, with the two rapier wit drag queens Maureen and Vanessa (probably the sanest characters in the entire show) delivering some great lines in particular. But often the play felt like it was on a knife edge between humour and cruelty, with comic moments abruptly being flipped into tragedy in a way that made me squirm in my seat and feel guilty for laughing. It reminded me a lot of David Foster Wallace’s short story anthology Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which has also been adapted for the stage), where each chapter tells a story from the perspective of a different man who is somehow dysfunctional. It’s frequently hilarious, but always ends up sad.

The auditorium was packed for Boys on the Verge of Tears, and seeing this work from a new writer was genuinely exciting. We’re constantly fascinated by dysfunctional men in mainstream drama (both Robert Oppenheimer and Barbie‘s Ken have their fair share of problems) and in real life we love to give dysfunctional men great status and power (Donald Trump, Elon Musk to name a couple). I wondered when I watched this play if we’ve romanticised the idea of men being dysfunctional and decided this is actually a normal way for men to be. Boys on the Verge of Tears makes male dysfunction as ugly and unromantic as possible. That’s bleak, but there are also elements of honesty and compassion in this, and that’s positive and important.

I’ve only just recovered from this unusually hard-hitting Cog Night, but I love that we choose to include some challenging content among the events we go to as a group. I’m looking forward to May’s outing, where I’m sure we’ll be doing something completely different yet again!

Lou Kiss created our illustration, see more work on their website.