Double Act Review: A Look Into The Male Mind

Ahead of watching Double Act, a short play performed thrice in one night (!), I researched the plot, characters, and casting team involved in this production, mostly through the ‘People You Know Productions’ instagram. The casting call for the ‘darkly comic’ play revealed that the plot consists of three seventeen year-old boys experiencing the full spectrum of teenage angst which features, I feel, frustratingly often in the cultural sphere. With this in mind, I armed myself for an evening of feeling ever-so slightly annoyed and mildly bored - watching two actors go through the destructive cycle of self-hate, battles with self-image, and ultimately a lot of misogyny and homophobia, excused through a ‘psycho-theatrical’ lens, is not my ideal way to spend a Tuesday evening. 

Sitting on the floor of a cellar on South Street, St Andrews, I and 15 others gathered to see this androcentric universe come to life. The setting promised a fun story, even if  the dungeon-like quality was mismatched to the urban, ostensibly working-class context of the play. The two actors were already poised on stage when we walked in, immediately breaking down boundaries between the audience and the ‘stage’, which, through writer Maisie Michaelson-Friend’s careful hybrid construction of dialogue and interior monologue, dominated the play. ‘Bentley’ (Aubrey McCance), hood up, mouth twisted into a scowl, was sitting in a small alcove in the cellar, visible enough to be considered an equal and opposite reaction to his upright counterpart, ‘Rob’ (Dylan Swain). 

Like two sides of the same coin, they traded off from monologuing, each taking on an impressive array of voices. Michaelson-Friend captured a unique sphere of British culture in her creation of these characters: Swain plays not only ‘Rob’, but also large parts of the role of ‘Mikey’, on whom the plot of the play rests. Similarly, McCance, taking breaks from his stony, drug-dealing character of ‘Bentley’, slipped into the voices of Mikey, Mikey’s unnamed sister, and random partygoers. This duality in the actors provided levity in an otherwise dark storyline, and was what impressed me most about the production. Clearly, director Callum Wardman-Browne and producer Jacinta Guelfi focused most on the range of voices used and their delivery, to excellent results. 

My initial thoughts about the play, though subverted by the sheer presence of both McCance and Swain, were not entirely wrong. The female characters in the play, alongside Mikey, who is made an object of homophobia and thus not as ‘masculine’ as either of the main characters, are mere dramatic propellers, much like staging or lighting, to further the stagnant journey of Rob, and the mystery that shrouds Bentley.

‘Lindsay’, voiced by Swain to great comic effect, enters in the final ‘scene’ of the play as an icon of the male gaze; Swain’s physical acting supported his interior monologue seamlessly in this scene. Hands running through his hair in desire, legs splayed proudly apart, then, hands entwined behind his back and a meek smile as he delivered Lindsay’s lines. By the apotheosis of the play, when it is abundantly clear to the audience that Mikey has been killed in a coke-fueled car crash, the fantasy that Lindsay represented to Rob is dissolving before his eyes. Rather than the death of his friend, in which he is evidently complicit, it is Lindsay’s curls, now ‘loose’ and her once ‘tanned’ skin, ‘paler now,’ which is most unsettling to Rob, delivered with expertise by Swain. Michaelson-Friend’s writing skilfully places Lindsay as a blank scale on which the events of the play can be measured; women characters, even when not really personified, are the ‘butt’ of this male-domineered tragedy. 

As I clambered my way out of the cellar into the spring evening light, I was struck by the sheer force of the play: a relatively familiar story had been told, but in an inventive and arresting way. Rather than revealing the inner souls and true softness of these boys, the play reflects a banality at the core of modern male life, emulated well by the black-out in the cellar at the end of Swain’s final, futile, speech. 

Photos and graphics by Elena Koestel Santamaria and Hanna Sabu