Boys on the Verge of Tears review – a whistle-stop tour of bewildered masculinity

Soho theatre, London
Set entirely within the stained walls of a men’s public toilet, Sam Grabiner’s award-winning play is an ambitious, hallucinatory series of vignettes dramatising the gamut of male neuroses

Recent plays set in toilets have dwelt on the modern-day weaponisation of this communal domain. The neutral WCs in Public: The Musical showed characters of assorted gender identities conversing across the cubicles, while Overflow confined one trans woman to a contested space. Boys on the Verge of Tears, which unfolds entirely within the stained, sticky white walls of a brightly lit lavatory (four stalls, four sinks, four urinals), feels more old-school.

In a male spin on Rachel Hirons’s When Women Wee, five actors portray around 30 men and boys in a string of vignettes; the result is a whistle-stop tour of bewildered masculinity. No one here quite embodies a character with the same economy of gesture as the wiry, haunted Matthew Beard: with a cocksure strut or a horrified flinch, he can evoke whole worlds of confidence and neurosis. Calvin Demba shows impressive range too, switching from a shy middle-schooler in a tiger onesie (shades of Blue Remembered Hills) to a swaggering teenager and finally a clubber whose blood-stained shirt is a buzzkill.