Boy out the City at the Turbine Theatre

“If England is a body, then London is the belly button, and I wanted to crawl in,” says Declan Bennett, mid-way through his one-man show cum spiritual odyssey, Boy out the City. But he’s left the big smoke, for a sleepy Oxfordshire village, that’s as picturesque as it is dull. That’s the initial conflict of this lockdown-set story: where do we fit?

The Covid-themed performance is dangerous ground for an artist to grapple with. Almost as soon as the lockdown of March 2020 began, creatives began to spit out reactive pieces that grappled with the experience in real time. Many of these were bad; distance was needed, but by the time so-called “Freedom Day” rolled around, most viewers had had enough of the aesthetics of lockdown: the surgical mask; the two-metre distances, the banana bread and solo bingeing sessions. 

Boy out the City traffics in all of these markers of the time, but refrains from cliché through force of will. Bennett’s performance is so commanding that viewers will believe this is the first time they’ve heard a story like his – and in some ways it is. Around halfway through the hour-long runtime, Bennett’s spiralling mental health sends the play’s narrative down a new path. It turns from the Covidified games into memoir-like reminiscences: life in Coventry, growing up with a Catholic mother and hiding his sexuality from schoolmates; life in London, where he experiences hedonistic liberation until an act of God gets in the way. 

With just a few gestures and a consistent use of space to demarcate areas of the stage as different parts of mind and memory, Bennett and his director Nancy Sullivan turn this mess of ideas and recollections into an exciting performance with a clear and logical mapping of one man’s psychology. Cliché be damned, we’re all living it.  

BP Flanagan
Photos: Colin J Smith Photography

Boy out the City is at the Turbine Theatre from 9^th November until 13^th November 2021. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.