Director Eoin McKenzie talks about The Show for Young Men
February half term sees the arrival of the amazing Imagine Festival for young people at the Southbank Centre. This annual fun fest has now been running for over two decades and is the largest of its kind in the UK. Featuring daily free events and outstanding shows for children across all age groups, there’s entertainment for everybody, with some exceptional big names in the mix this year including Jacqueline Wilson and Quentin Blake.
Amongst the many artforms on the programme, it’s great to see some dance available in the form of The Show for Young Men. We were delighted to speak to director Eoin McKenzie to find out what this production brings to the festival.
Eoin, it’s great to talk to you about The Show for Young Men. Can you first tell us what it’s about?
At its heart, The Show for Young Men is a meeting. Onstage, an adult man – dancer Robbie Synge – and a young boy, Alfie, step into a world that looks like a building site. They are themselves, but they’re also carrying inherited ideas of masculinity: what a man is supposed to be, how he’s supposed to behave, how he’s allowed to connect with other men.
Together they play, wrestle, test each other’s limits, fall into moments of tension and release – and gradually find ways of moving and being together that feel softer, stranger, and more caring. The building site shifts into a playground, then into something unexpectedly delicate. There’s football commentary crackling through a radio, pop songs and folk ballads cutting across the space. It’s funny, chaotic, and then suddenly very tender.
Ultimately, it’s a show about love – and about expanding how men can connect with each other and learn from each other.
Why did you want to discuss the serious topic of masculine roles at a children’s festival?
Because these ideas are already alive in young people’s bodies. Long before we have language for gender, we learn how to stand, how to compete, how to touch, how to hide certain feelings. I wanted to make a show that meets young audiences where they already are – in play, in imagination, in physical connection – and lets them see masculinity not as a fixed identity, but as something we can shape and have agency over.
There was also a simple artistic desire: I wanted to make a show for young men that actually includes a young man onstage. Children rarely see themselves on stage. The moment Alfie walks onstage, young audiences are immediately with him. He’s one of them. That shifts the entire room.
How does putting the conversation into dance form make it accessible to a young audience?
Movement gets to the point faster than explanation. You don’t need prior knowledge to understand a game turning into a fight, or dissolving into a dance. The relationship between Robbie and Alfie is built through physical negotiation – who’s in charge, who sets the rules, who teaches, who learns. Those dynamics are instantly readable to children.
We also work with familiar textures: football radio commentary, pop songs, laughter, moments of silliness. That keeps the piece grounded and playful even when it brushes against more difficult feelings. The result isn’t a lesson about masculinity. It’s an experience of watching two people try to figure out how to be with each other.
Tell us about your cast
There are just two performers. Robbie Synge is a celebrated dancer in his forties, with decades of experience in contemporary performance. Alfie had never danced professionally when we began – he was eight years old when we started working together.
What you see onstage is shaped by their real relationship. They are not playing characters; they are navigating trust, care, competition and affection in real time. Their friendship is the engine of the work, and audiences feel it immediately.
The show premiered at the Edinburgh Festival fringe back in 2024, but what’s been its journey since?
We made the piece slowly over two years, through play, improvisation and trial-and-error – keeping what felt exciting and discarding what didn’t. It was developed with support from Imaginate, AabenDans in Denmark and Creative Scotland, and The Fringe was our first chance to place it in front of audiences. Our sold out run as part of Made In Scotland was an amazing experience for all of us!
Since then, the work has continued to grow. It has been presented at the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival and at Nottdance, and in 2025 we re-made the piece in Denmark with Aaben Dans, working with a new adult performer and a new young boy. That process of re-casting and re-building the work was vital – it’s allowed us to test what is essential in the piece, and what can shift depending on the people inside it.
Touring has let the show deepen with each audience it meets. Bringing it now to Southbank Centre’s Imagine Festival – and soon to Krokus Festival in Belgium – feels like an important next step in letting the work reach wider audiences and continue finding its full life.
What do you hope the audience come away with from the show?
First, I hope they enjoy it – that they laugh, feel surprised, maybe feel moved emotionally too.
But beyond that, I hope young audiences sense that masculinity is something they can question, stretch, soften, reconfigure. If a child leaves thinking, even quietly, “I didn’t know men could be like that with each other,” then something good has happened. Really, we’re trying to show there’s a different possibility!
For adults, it often opens reflections on the men and boys in their own lives – the tenderness that exists, and the tenderness that’s been missing. Ultimately, the piece is an invitation to imagine different futures for how men relate to one another. And to try those futures out together for a while in a theatre.
Thanks very much to Eoin for telling us all about this exciting dance production.
The Show for Young Men is aimed at ages 8+ and takes place as part of the Imagine Festival at Southbank Centre from Friday 13 to Saturday 14 February.
