Theatre review: Bacon

Teenage codependency at the Finborough where Sophie Swithinbank's Bacon sees two 15-year-old outsiders find a kind of escape with each other - before discovering they're as bad for each other as anything they're escaping. Middle-class Mark (Corey Montague-Sholay) has moved to a Catholic boys' school after his parents' divorce, and quickly finds he won't break into any of the established friendship cliques in any hurry, especially as a rather quiet, fussy and studious boy. Darren (William Robinson) has the swagger and intimidating talk of a bully, but fewer social skills than even that would suggest: He's suspended from school so often, he has as little a friendship circle there as Mark. They clash on Mark's first day, but then at every one of his attempts to socialise Darren seems to be around. When Darren frames Mark so they end up in detention together, one of the boys at least starts to admit to himself that this is becoming a weird kind of friendship, and that he's excited about it.

The story is narrated by Mark four years later, when they're unexpectedly reunited; one of them has had a nervous breakdown and the other has been in a juvenile detention centre, so we know from the start this friendship is going to go badly wrong.

There are certainly overarching story beats to Bacon that feel familiar - the excellent pair of actors bring an underlying sexual tension long before their characters begin to consciously acknowledge and question it. Darren lives with his abusive, drug-dealing father, so it's also not hard to see how any hope this could turn into a sweet gay teenage romance is going to get knocked into a much more tragic direction: Mark's more supportive family means he feels comfortable accepting he's gay* comparatively quickly, but when Darren starts to consider that he might return his feelings, his father's response sends him on a destructive path.

Fortunately Swithinbank's approach feels like it's looking at the story from a slightly more contemporary angle; it still has echoes of a whole tradition of self-loathing gay plays, but the focus feels like it's less about whether Darren will eventually identify as gay as well, more whether he's even allowed to figure out how he relates to other men at all. In other words it's more of a toxic masculinity play than a gay play - with few other friends his own age, Darren's only male role models to choose between are Mark and his father, and the latter's attitudes to what makes a man are very specific.

Designer Natalie Johnson centres the action on a raised platform in the middle of a traverse stage, and when its supports are taken away it becomes an oversized see-saw: Not only an on-the-nose metaphor for the way the boys' power balance shifts over the story, but also one of the ways director Matthew Iliffe keeps a two-character story largely made up of narration from becoming visually boring. The way the actors have to time getting on or off the platform to keep the balance right lends a physical precarity to match the tension in the story. The way Darren defaults to abusive behaviour could easily make him the villain of the piece, but Swithinbank, Iliffe and Robinson bring out enough vulnerability to make it heartbreaking when Mark finally accepts how their story has to end. An alternately tender and brutal play, and one whose overall structure could make it seem formulaic, but the author's fresh dialogue combined with an intense production kicks it up several notches.

Bacon by Sophie Swithinbank is booking until the 26th of March at the Finborough Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ali Wright.

*although hopefully it doesn't need mentioning to any parents of LGBTQ+ kids: Laughing and saying you already knew is not the right response to them coming out