Austen aficionados might miss some of the author’s intricacies, and some supporting characters get short shrift, but this isn’t a show that simply delivers a precis of the plot.

Rather, it emphasises Elizabeth Bennet’s prejudice and Mr Darcy’s pride, and the contentions and follies – some personal, some social – strewn across their road to romance.

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It leans into the Shakespearean sense of the perversity of human nature that Austen possessed (and an inside eye on the lived experience of women that Shakespeare lacked).

Tyran Parke’s direction has mastered the difficult feat of combining spoken word and near constant musical accompaniment without distracting from either. And if this Pride and Prejudice isn’t so profound a literary engagement as, say, Miriam Margolyes’ Dickens’ Women, Garner’s performance is as skilled, and it’s just as much fun.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

This review was written from a preview performance.

THEATRE | FRINGE FESTIVAL
Bad Boy ★★★★
fortyfivedownstairs, until October 13

“Luvya tits! Luvya tits!” cries the pint-sized ringmaster, broadcasting his coarse lust at the start of Patricia Cornelius’ Bad Boy. It’s “Roll-up! Roll-up!” retuned in an aggressive, misogynistic key, and on opening night, spectators to this little circus soon found the ringmaster doubling as clown.

I don’t know if it was intentional, but performer Nicci Wilks’ false moustache kept slithering from her lip, and not even her highly trained dexterity – Wilks’ career began at the Flying Fruit Fly Circus – could stop it from dropping pathetically to the floor.

A moment of ‘Insecure masculinity… Ta-dah!’ to undermine the demeaning barrage was thematically perfect for a work that sees Wilks, playwright Cornelius, and director Susie Dee rejoin forces to explore domestic violence.

Their last collaboration, Runt, embodied the psychology of abjection, cruelty and powerlessness through condensed monologue and heightened physical theatre. This one feels like a natural extension.

Gender is in the hot seat here, and within minutes Wilks has stripped off the greasepaint to get under the skin of a small man who needs women to be smaller still.

This is a love story. A romance. We all know it – the disturbing lyrics of popular love songs (The Police’s creepy Every Breath You Take is just the beginning) scroll above the action.

And Wilks’ character feels it – he’s genuinely smitten by his new girlfriend, even as the relationship slides (and there’s a sickening inevitability to how ‘normal’ Bad Boy makes the trajectory seem) into coercive control and eventually physical violence.

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Wilks inhabits this frustrated figure with a sharp comic touch and empathic scrutiny. She’s so convincing as a bloke, she might fool those who don’t know her gender, though those who do will discover moments of dramatic equivocation far deeper than a wayward moustache or the hilariously extended pissing contest he has with himself.

Wilks can silently reflect the agony of the woman to whom the play gives no voice. When the man has a flicker of transient insight into his behaviour – horrified by what he’s done – we see the terror mirrored in his victim’s prone body, too.

Peppered with clowning, break-dancing, karaoke and spoken word with a spotlight on the everyman, Bad Boy channels variety performance to illustrate the nexus between social, psychological and cultural contributors to domestic violence and the plausibly imagined individual experience of a perpetrator.

Perhaps Cornelius’ script is distilled to the point of under-realisation on occasion, but that just gives greater focus to Wilks’ bravura performance, and the clarity of Dee’s direction in framing a problem that implicates our whole society.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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