Last year director Sacha Wares and set designer Miriam Buether transformed the
Almeida for
Game, the design becoming the clear star of a show that would have
floundered without it. Leo Butler's
Boy fills its hour-and-a-quarter a lot
more confidently in its own right than Mike Bartlett's play did, but there's no
denying the cleverness of the staging is one of the things that stands out -
possibly, at times, to the detriment of the script. Liam (Frankie Fox) is 17 and, as
the publicity describes him, "a boy at a bus stop, easily missed." For the audience
he's the focal point of the 75 minutes, but for everyone else on the stage with him
he might as well be invisible, except at those times where they're going out of
their way to ignore or dismiss him.
Boy opens with him visiting a doctor
(Wendy Kweh,) with a concern he's too inarticulate to express, so she can't find anything physically wrong with him.
