This play is something quite special
Suicide. Gulp. The leading cause of death of men under fifty – a statistic that has fuelled one-time-student-medic, writer and actor Nick Hyde to explore this ‘silent epidemic’, writes Eleanor Thorn.
A comedy, promised the description, “a comedy” said I, not convincingly enough, to my co-theatre-goer to be, whose faint heartedness and grief caused her to bail out. My newly qualified psychologist friend joined me, and here I am better equipped, post-show, to convince you the reader that two young men playing one young man mid mental health crisis is indeed worth a night out and is done in such a way as to be both funny in an almost slapstick-but-not sort of way, and touchingly sensitive. We never learn what has ultimately led this man to take the train to the coast rather than go into the office. Everything and nothing. What matters is the banter, the dialogue, the internal tussles that occur along the way, which ultimately lead to him standing atop a well-known cliff. This could be any male dissatisfied with his lot, overcome by a sense of powerlessness and futility, and nothing along the way deters him from his decided destination.
Nick Hyde and Oliver Maynard together play out the different voices going on inside and outside the head of their joint character. They each become the acquaintance, friend or stranger encountered en route, vacillating between the internal voice and the external. With eyes blacked up, faces pastily whitened, they are Laurel and Hardy, they are clowns without the sad, red smiles, and they are flawed with a melange of contemporary male bravado, stand-up mouthiness and mundane anxiety. They both are one in a way that is quite original, allowing a real exploration of the inner workings of an unhappy mind. We laugh and we sympathise, despite the mansplaying and the bowel emptying!
Little by little there are signs indicating intent. For the keen-eared there’s a reference to a body of water being too shallow. As the play progresses, these signs grow more apparent. We are Tuesday 5th March and we are drawn into the interplay between an attempt at cheerful optimism and the winning depressed and negative thoughts.
All happens in just one day. A now ‘successful’ old school friend chance encounter, a quick anxiety-inducing school-kid-hampered stop at the local shop, a commuter train where imagination runs riot… is how it starts. Come 9:53am, he is/they are on a park bench, more ominously asking “What do you do on a last day?”. We learn of a broken relationship, we see flashbacks, ultimately we see him dice with death, out on the edge.
This double-act is cleverly, sensitively written. Astonishingly, given the content, we emerge from the grey skies and waves of the South Coast into the theatre bar giggling slightly, both acknowledging this play to be something quite special. Suicide, or not, on a dull day, on a belly full of burgers: it’s broaching the unbroachable.
Southwark Playhouse Borough, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London, SE1 6BD from 19th March – 5th April.
Booking and full details: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/double-act/
