Review: The Last Incel, Pleasance Theatre

There’s a particular horror to hearing the word “Becky” spat out like a slur, especially when delivered with the deranged earnestness of someone who thinks they’ve uncovered a terrible truth. The Last Incel, Jamie Sykes’ ferocious and unexpectedly funny play, opens in exactly that register: a Zoom call among four young men whose bitterness about women has curdled into part of a globally emerging ideology. They sneer. They sulk. They talk in misogynistic jargon. Then one of them – Jack, played with brittle, aching vulnerability by Fiachra Corkery – confesses something unspeakable: he’s had sex.

Thus begins a reckoning. The gang – who call themselves ‘Cuckboy’ and ‘Crusher’ – can’t cope with this betrayal, especially their self-appointed leader Percy (Jackson Ryan, extraordinary in his spiralling extremism), who rants like a Poundland Jordan Peterson.

Things spiral further when Margaret (Justine Stafford), the woman Jack slept with and a journalist by trade, bursts into their digital sanctum and calmly challenges their certainty. This is dangerous ground for satire, but Sykes handles it with impressive dexterity. There’s no punching down. Instead, he leans into the absurdity of the culture these boys have built – the trembling psychology, jargon-heavy chats, and weird pride in their isolation – while also treating them as recognisably human. The incels aren’t cartoon villains. They’re lonely. They’re scared. One minute you rage at their bile and slurs, the next you want to give them a hug and gently point them toward the light.

What elevates the show is how artfully it moves between registers. One moment, you stifle a laugh at a grotesquely phrased diatribe about women, the next, the cast flings themselves into euphoric, synchronised dance to a pop banger: hello, Rina Sawayama.

The transitions are seamless and thrilling, with camp choreography to Alison Moyet one minute, vile misogynistic monologue the next. It shouldn’t work. But it does. Those breakout dance numbers (mixing sexual frustration and soft-boy melodrama) are where the show’s aesthetic truly sings: all fuchsia lighting, twerking through Zoom screens, and choreography that suggests these boys have been watching Glee in incognito mode. We discover in the final moments the masculinity they claim to defend is performative, fragile, practically begging to burst into jazz hands. It’s hilarious and revealing: And when Margaret’s safety is threatened the play flirts with real danger. Cancel culture, after all, is the true jeopardy of this generation.

The ending doesn’t resolve so much as fade out, but that feels right. Radicalisation rarely ties itself up neatly. The Last Incel isn’t here to solve the problem; it’s here to make us sit with its queasy, insidious presence. 

The lessons land hard. It made me think about inceldom more than I ever have, reminding us these men aren’t mythical monsters on the fringes. They’re family. They’re your neighbour. They’re the guy you chatted with outside of Maccies after a heavy night. Most chillingly, it shows incels aren’t just a danger to women, they’re a danger to themselves. This isn’t just a misogynist ideology that endangers women, it’s a public health crisis swallowing the men who subscribe to it. The Last Incel is bold, uncomfortable, and very funny theatre, and Jamie Sykes is absolutely one to watch. Go and see it.

Written and directed by Jamie Sykes.
Movement Direction by Emily Kilkenny Roddy

The Last Incel plays at Pleasance Theatre until Saturday 31 May.