Boy (Almeida Theatre)

I'm really looking forward to hearing about how this show turns out. The preliminary information is very exciting.

Does anybody know the running time?

Thanks

Can't disagree with Snciole on this.

Oh gosh I really wanted to like this... and I didn't.

The Almeida configuration is impressive but distracting (I was in front row and the relentless drone of the travelator was a constant reminder of the artifice).

It is just so episodic and there is no overall dramatic thrust or even character development.  I know that the playwright worked with the young cast to make sure that the street slang was appropriate. But I don't understand it when I hear it at the bus stop and I didn't understand it here (particular scene at the bus stop is relevant). Maybe the goal is to reach out to young people but there has to be a way to get to both audiences.

I understand the message of the play - I'm a Guardian reader, I'm familiar with a middle-class perspective on people who are doing less well in society - I just don't think this adds anything to the conversation. Decent performances but there's really no characterisation for the actors to work with.

Worthy but dull. At least it was only 70 minutes.

Having a look at seats, anyone any advice for which cheaper seats would be alright? How's the upper level?

I really enjoyed this. I went with very low expectations and came away very moved. The last few lines were heartbreaking. Well done to the Almeida for staging this. A good week for theatre after The Flick on Thursday which I adored.

I loved this. Approached as an art exhibit, this play is as brilliant as it gets!

Some spoilers follow. . .

Since the play is about a boy who has no forward momentum, it would be phony to write a propulsive plot for him, so instead the play adopts the genre of "realism," which genre Roberto Rossellini said was "the artistic version of the truth."

There is SO much "truth" in this play. In neo-realist fims, like "The Bicycle Thieves" (a boy helps his dad look for a bicycle) or the more recent "The White Balloon" (a girl goes to buy a goldfish), filmmakers took cameras to the streets, and the story was as much about depicting who and what teems the streets outside, as about the protagonists. Here the plot is similar (a Boy goes to Sports Direct).

This play achieves the inverse of those neo-realist films, breaking down the streets of London into component parts, and bringing them inside the Almeida, to be reassembled, before being disassembled again. Whether it is strings of Oyster machines, the frontage of Billy Elliot, bus stops with National Lottery adverts, supermarket checkout machines, or simply myriads of people on their mobile phones, our landscape in deconstructed, allowing for an accounting.

The travelator set is genius, literally an assembly line mechanical process that presents our lives to us as an assembly line mechanical process, all the machines and rote behaviours we engage in day in and day out, as well as being a metaphor for the Boy's life going nowhere. I felt echoes of Michael Landy's 2001 art show, where he disassembled everything he owned, placed it on a travelator, and fed it into a crushing machine. The question for us, as for Landy, is, is there anything to our lives other than our rote mechanical interactions with machines and people?

The play's process, deconstructing the building blocks of our lives, might have been merely a clever exercise were it not for it's emotional engagement with it's central character, the Boy (played by Frankie Fox, in an unforgettable stage debut), who it also sets out to deconstruct, with immense compassion.

Critical to understanding him is his street patois, which by endless repetition, the play deconstucts to reveal a language of love, a forlorn desperate yearning for connection.

For instance, if you said to the Boy the word "theatreboard," which has no meaning, in and of itself, nonetheless his language has a rote reply. The reply is "Oh, is it, cuz, theatreboard, innit."

Every word of the reply, is seeking a connection with you, the speaker: the expression "Oh" is there to flatter you that what you have said engenders amazement, the expression "is it" is an affirmation that you have been heard, the expression "cuz" suggests that you are regarded as close as family, like a cousin, the word "theatreboard" is repeated as an active demonstration you have been heard, and the word "innit" suggests that not only has the Boy heard you, but he reflects your own utterance back at you as an affirmation of you.

So a language that sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo reveals itself, in it's every expression, to be a search for human contact, an attempt to bond which the play suggests is almost impossible in the rote mechanical machine interactive world we have created for ourselves.

I think this play is unforgettable, and even more than the Harington Faustus, is better appreciated if the appetite for narrative is checked at the door.

5 stars

Please do go

It really is quite amazing

Understated

I did think the moving set was a bit clumsy and noisy
And there are some audibility issues with dialogue

But the message from the play is incredibly important and moving

As said by others and myself before the ending is heartbreaking

From what I remember some of those £10 "seats" are actually standing positions. I think that's what the three showing on the left of row B are. Good views from there and it's on,y just over an hour so I'd think about them. Not sure about the others I'm afraid.

Like Xanderl, I prefer the red partially restricted seats, which typically have the pillar at the three-quarter mark. The yellow restricted view seats tend to have then pillar in the centre, which I find offputting.

However, for this production, my partially restricted seat (the red one in the image above in Stalls Row J) was worse than usual, because this stage is immensely wide, the pillar fell in the centre, and the travelator pushes every object on it behind those pillars on the near side and the far side constantly, to my distraction. So I moved myself into an empty seat in Row E (a row which was half empty), as there seemed to be many empty seats. I had the sense that quite a few regulars had got the word that there is not much plot, and decided not to show up.

The £10 standing seats, which I assume are the purple ones, looked great from where I was sitting, and I would sooner have had one of those than the one I bought.

I'm feeling the same.  Plus found out that someone we know has a daughter in the show....