NASTY BOY
The Play
"Don't
go standing on any balconies!"
"
Black comedy about quantum physics, psoriasis and serial killers.
martin watches too much telly; it's having a bad effect on him
and he treats his mum something rotten. He's got a vicious streak
in him. They are both trapped in a TV twilight wold of soundbites,
clichés and jingles. Dennis Tuck, s door-to-door salesman,
trying to come to terms with his own existence and the nature
of the universe, holds them hostage with a potato masher.
A
hilarious comedy about life, death, and the universe. Jim Madden's
play explores TV and the effect it has on its audience and the
philosophy of life according to a man who has lost it all.Brilliant
Dialogue".
Andrew White - Southern Daily Echo
.
Edinburgh
Fringe Festival Rating of
Nasty
Boy : 
|
The
Nasty Boy of the title is indeed a snarling, sneering, foul-mouthed,
aggressive, feckless youth, mindlessly channel surfing and too idle
even to change out of his pyjamas. Or so he would like us to believe,
though writer Jim Maddens drops enough hints that he may not be
quite the bully he would like to be.
His
mother, apparently in a world of her own, hoovers around him, ignores
the increasingly scabrous insults and makes him a cup of tea. Into
this bizarre household, the bastard offspring of an unnatural union
between Joe Orton and the Royle family, comes Denis Tuck, a sweating,
ingratiating door-to-door salesman who, since we’re on the subject
of unnatural unions, might well be the result of a chance encounter
between Arthur Miller and Quentin Tarantino.
Jim Madden himself plays Tuck as he attempts to sell the family
a potato masher, chopping board, cleansing fluids and snap-top plastic
buckets among other things. His sales pitches, in a desperate attempt
to get the family’s attention away from their own bickering, take
flight into elaborate, even rococo rants on the weirdest subjects
up to and including particle physics.
Bludgeoned into awestruck silence, the son finally realizes that
if he is going to make himself “interesting” by acting “disturbed”
he is going to have to go some way to cope with nutters like Tuck.
The mother ends up with a handful of household goods she doesn’t
want. And Tuck goes on his way.
It’s
a very weird little piece this, very funny in parts and black and
disturbing in others. The production is unhelpful, not at all sure
of what tone it is trying to adopt and only Madden himself comes
close to the level of violence in the performance that matches the
language. But there is something going on here in the writing that
is worth watching.
Robert Dawson Scott
Friday,
10th August 2001 scotsman.com
Edinburgh
Fringe Festival 2001
Production
by: Komedia Productions
Venue: Komedia Roman Eagle Lodge
Author: Rose Foley
Publication: The List Festival
This
is an uncomfortable play; not because it is badly written, but rather
because it is so well written and performed that the niggling tension
and incredible claustrophobia of the stage spills over into the
audience. Confronted with the potential tragedy of a 'nasty' layabout
telly-addict and his pension-drawing mother trapped in stasis and
at constant logger heads one has to have a penchant for the Royle
Family-style humour to find it amusing. If you don't, you'll begin
to feel like the arriving door-to-door salesman; forced into their
company the potato masher becomes more and more attractive as a
means of gaining some peace and quiet. Jim Madden certainly proves
that Sartre was right: hell is other people.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2001
Production
by: Komedia Productions
Venue: Komedia Roman Eagle Lodge
Author: Kate McGrath
Martin
watches a quiz show on TV; his mother starts hovering around him;
the tension mounts. Jim Maddens' new play is an image of domesticity
gone wrong: the central relationship between mother and son is utterly
negative, each bullying and balking at the other, each resigned
to each other's damaging company. Madden's self-conscious stylised
writing echoes the absurdism of Ionesco in its repetitious circularity,
added to by Michael Kirchner (Martin)'s frantic delivery and crazed
smile.
There are moments of dark humour as mother and son's intertwining
monologues link psoriasis and murder, and a terrible salesman figure
(played by Madden) arrives and is unwillingly dragged in to the
claustrophobic world they inhabit, only to crack up himself.
The acting is weak, and the best thing about this play is the potential
of the writer, who builds up the pace and hysteria brilliantly only
to let it ebb away at the end, leaving us with only the noise of
the ever-present TV set droning on like the lives of the characters
we have briefly met.
