In the tiny Glass Mask cafe-theatre, Charlie (Lauren Farrell) tosses strips of raw offal into a bucket. A butcher who loves her job, Charlie is entertaining a potential boyfriend, the brash welder, Victor (Rex Ryan) in her white-tiled butcher’s shop, surrounded by meat flanks and an array of knives and cleavers. This bracingly unromantic scenario was created in 1972 by Bavarian playwright and actor, Franz Xaver Kroetz, in his play Männersache, which he later expanded into Through the Leaves.
In his new version, award-winning playwright Simon Stephens brings Kroetz’s stark play closer to the present day, with blasts of post-punk on the soundtrack but no mobile phones evident in Ross Gaynor’s production. Whether it is in the sharp blades displayed on the wall in Andrew Clancy’s arrestingly clinical design, or the boozy Victor’s hollow-eyed stare into the audience, a threat of violence hovers from the start.
