Jamie and Matt are two young men indulging in the exchange of sexual fantasies over the internet. But hey, wait a minute, are those their real names? They know each other at first only as Butt Boy and Tigger, and those aren’t their real names either. What is real? Are either of them really who they say they are? Is Butt Boy really a virgin? “You could be a fourteen year old!” says one in a moment of panic. We are in wonderful, fertile territory here, and Steven Dawson’s wild and sexy script explores it to the full, spilling over the edge of the map into the nether places of the human psyche where dragons dwell.
Your reviewer once penetrated this world (no double-entendre intended). Fortunately I never met the person on the other end of the broadband connection and probably, for reasons I shall not divulge, it was a very good thing that I didn’t. Butt Boy and Tigger do, however, and this contrast between anonymous on-line relationships and real flesh and blood encounters is what makes this play so engrossing and fascinating.
It is also extremely funny. On the night I went, the audience were literally rolling in the aisles and holding their sides. It was not hard to realise why. Felix Allsop and Angus Brown have to be two of the most accomplished actors on the fringe and enact their on-line fantasies with such gusto and insane pleasure that one is swept along with their virtual relationship. From master and slave pleasures to an imagined deflowering in the trenches during the First World War, these young men explore in cyber-space the kind of things most of us never achieve in reality, or even admit to wanting to achieve. That is what the internet has done, made everything possible, at least on a virtual level. When they ultimately meet, the cold wind of reality blows, and we learn - as if we ever needed to - that people are far more complicated than their internet profiles.
The final ten minutes must rank as the most moving I have ever spent in a theatre. Those two lost cyberspace souls come face to face in a railway station and have nothing to say. And yet, Dawson’s script leaves us on an upbeat note, with a knowing wink to the human spirit. Love and human relationships will prevail, and the internet will be our slave, not our master. A brilliant, thought-provoking and deeply moving play. If you see nothing else, catch this.
[David Scott]
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