A new, welcome body of male-centred plays are interrogating masculinity and mental health through the subject of sport. Where dramas such as Red Pitch and Dear England focus on football, Bones revolves around rugby.
Ed (Ronan Cullen) is a star player, but off the field is silently struggling with anxiety and grief. Laddish banter and drinking bonds him with teammates Charlie (Samuel Hoult), Will (Ainsley Fannen) and Ollie (James Mackay) but also leaves him emotionally marooned.
Under Daniel Blake’s direction, the production effectively dramatises the adrenaline charge of the sport and its physical dangers. Staged just short of a rugby match at 70 minutes, there are artful scenes in which characters run across AstroTurf while Eliza Willmott’s excellent sound design sets their movement against drum’n’bass and electronica. This conveys the brute energy of the sport, with scrum formations and men charging into each other.
But as important as its subject matter is, especially given high male suicide rates in recent years, Lewis Aaron Wood’s script doesn’t quite fly. Characters are flimsy, and the choreography brings pace and visual effects but gets in the way of the story’s development.
The main plotline involves Ed’s apparently broken leg. He says he fell down the stairs but Charlie suspects he is lying and tells the team, which seems clunky and unconvincing given they are best friends. A physiotherapist (Mackay, doubling up) gives Ed a mental health assessment but this part of the story goes nowhere. Ed’s father (also Mackay) occasionally appears, but is shadowy.
We are let into Ed’s mind during matches – he describes how he feels while playing a game, and there are tiny, tantalising emotional insights in these moments, such as the fact that he wished to be injured as a child in order to get more attention. Some of the performances are halting or wooden, so we do not believe in the connections between these characters. No one in the play feels known to us, and you end up wishing for more substance to match the production’s ample style.
At Park theatre, London, until 22 July
