The wayward contours of the working-class Welsh male mind come under the scalpel in this tragically funny trio of monologues.
An aborted disco night, a dead cat, the breast of a lady at the job centre, and pigeons with severed heads are all pivotal points in this teeth-grittingly human exploration of different journeys through manhood.
Director Vicky Featherstone won Paines Plough, a Fringe First, and a Herald Angel last year at Edinburgh for her production of Abi Morgan's Splendour. Here, her assured touch resonates from the start, as a young man with the expression of a mutinous goat walks out in front of a club lit by harshly luminous lights, and regales the audience with his knee-in-the-groin bottle-in-the-face approach to life.
The secret of this production's success is that the script - Gary Owen's first - contains potentially farcical elements, but neither Featherstone nor the actors ever play these moments for laughs.
Each character is totally absorbed by his dysfunctional personality: Gary has a taste for violence bordering on the psychotic; the crooner Matthew D Melody is sucked into a saccharine romantic world enhanced by his mild form of mental illness; and Russell Markham is imploding from a life full of repressed anger, which is causing everything from impotence to fear of cancer.
You cannot imagine story telling featuring prominently in any of the characters' upbringing, but the actors controls their monologues - each linked tangentially to the same Thursday night at the club - like a tightly crafted piece of music, playing the audience so that each clause resonates. David Rees Talbot is very effective as the hate-fuelled Gary, an a***hole who dobs enemies into Crimewatch for fun, and Steven Meo is charismatically naive as Matthew D Melody, who thinks Frank Sinatra can save the world.
Richard Mylan portrays a lack of confidence with confidence. Ultimately even Anne Robinson would enjoy this Welsh offering.
Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco
