Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

Big Boys Don't Cry
Komedia Roman Eagle Lodge

James Panton

Negativequity's Big Boys Don't Cry is an attempt to bring the politics of interpersonal relationships to the stage. Described in its promotional literature as 'I Love Lucy with a terrible twist', it tells the story of a domestically blissful relationship which descends slowly but surely into argument, abuse and violence. The twist is that it's the wife, not the husband, who does the abusing.

The piece starts in a brave and innovative way. The scene is a kitchen whose furniture is oversized and painted in primary colours, giving the impression of cartoon setting: the actors enter to a swing number and dance around the stage arm in arm; the scene is kitsch and comic: in short, everything is I Love Lucy.

After this scene of 1950s domesticity has been set at some length, things slowly start to go wrong: the bliss of sending her husband off to the train with his paper every morning, and preparing his pipe and slippers for his return, becomes irksome for our domestic goddess; his inability to find promotion, her desire for something more than she has, and that annoying habit of his of putting the salt and pepper pots on the table in the wrong place, all begin to strain the relationship.

Eventually she snaps and our poor and loving husband is chased around the stage, in and out of the over-sized dresser and cooker, with a rolling pin; everything has become Tom and Jerry. But then the mood takes a sudden shift: to remind us that domestic abuse, and especially the oddity of the physical abuse of a husband by his wife, is not funny, the mood becomes serious: accents change, dialogue becomes more serious, the oversized cooker becomes an undersized space where husband sits in hiding from his abusive wife.

This is a piece of theatre with a very simple message: domestic abuse where men suffer at the hands of their female partners isn't funny, it's serious. But the problem is that this message is the only substance of the piece, and it is a message which is too insubstantial, and too insufficiently developed to sustain 80 minutes of theatre.

The characterisation is hugely underdeveloped: there is no real explanation of why our cartoonesque domestic goddess transforms into homicidal maniac. Further, the abusive nature of the relationship is presented only as a direct inversion of the standard domestic abuse stereotype presented in hundreds of TV movies over the last two decades: she feels neglected, she resents his friends, they don't spend enough time together, she also happens to be a homicidal maniac in waiting (given that her transformation into homicidal maniac is not explained, I'm assuming that it must be a pretty common character trait in all of us).

Ultimately, this work's chief limitation is also its raison d'ètre: in attempting to use a theatrical form to present a political message all that is potentially interesting as a piece of drama is subsumed under the message, and is lost for this reason. The end experience is not unlike having been bludgeoned over the head with the latest government report on the dangers of interpersonal relationships: domestic abuse isn't funny; it isn't even funny if it's the husband being abused, it's serious; it's especially serious if it's the husband being abused because nobody admits that kind of thing goes on, and even if they did, everybody would think it was funny, which it isn't, it's serious.

Run over.