Powerful, poignant and piquant; an outrageously funny yet heartbreakingly moving exploration of the universal experiences of adolescence and grief.Rating
Unmissable!
Ollie Maddigan’s award-winning play The Olive Boy is an exceptional, compelling and important production. A superbly crafted monologue, based on his own bereavement as a teenager, it will have you laughing off your chair, before choking back tears. At times crude and crass, it’s nonetheless a nuanced and viscerally human articulation of the dark places grief can take you. But importantly, it creates a space where it’s OK to discuss bereavement; to reflect on the damage it can cause, and to consider how it might be possible to manage it.
At only 15 years of age Ollie (Maddigan) found his mum dead in bed. If that’s not distressing enough, he was then sent to live with his dad – a man he has barely known. Starting at a new school, he is now intent on finding his first girlfriend to help him move forward. It’s a testing situation for anyone, but what effect does it have on the coarse and chaotic mind of a hormonal 15 year old boy? It’s all downhill from here…
It is a huge challenge to make sense of adolescent incapacity whilst simultaneously articulating the impact of severe personal trauma. Maddigan embraces it with a tour de force performance and exceptional writing, skilfully giving form to difficult thinking and turbulently emotional material.
From the moment he enters he’s controlled, slick, connecting with the audience, as he struts the stage with teen swagger. He is a masterful storyteller, captivating from start to finish. Multiple colourful physical characterisations are laugh out loud funny, but are distilled, defined and paced to perfection by Scott Le Crass’s meticulous direction, vividly building the imagery of the teenage experience. There are some (admittedly utterly hilarious) cheap laughs about wanking and ugly girls – typical teenage boy jokes that verge on the unacceptable and have the audience open-mouthed – alongside stories of trying to impress peers, which ultimately go cringingly awry. But it becomes clear that Ollie’s bravado is illusory: it’s the armour of a desperately vulnerable boy in the bewildering space between childhood and adulthood who has no outlet or support for his emotional agony. The olive, initially representing a sweet nickname by his mum, becomes symbolic of the bitterness he’s consumed by and eventually his control collapses with devastating effect.
Adam Jefferys’ sympathetic lighting design has blinding spotlights and glitching green fluorescent tubes emphasising the harsh instability of bruising experience, as Maddigan machine-guns the audience with a salvo of foul behaviour and confused emotions. Yet from within the anarchy, searingly raw emotional moments sensitively reveal a damaged boy’s acute trauma, as he struggles to understand how to cope with grief. Maddigan deftly draws the audience ever closer until the roughness is smoothed over by understanding that all this is a cry for help. Video clips of Ollie as a happy toddler with his lovely mum are gut-wrenchingly impactful, and by the end of the evening I was not the only audience member utterly choked by the emotional effect of the show – there was a definite rush for the bar and a stiff drink!
Ollie’s journey is an odyssey through a dark underworld, where he examines what it means to have a parent, considers the roles of parent and child, and comes to understand and cope with what it is to love and be loved. His story ultimately offers optimism and gifts us opportunity to talk about grief, which so often goes unaddressed. The evening concludes with Maddigan entreating the audience to take that opportunity, whether it be to talk openly about their own grief or simply be in the room with someone who needs to do just that. How can we refuse?
Written by Ollie Maddigan
Directed by Scott Le Crass
Lighting Design by Adam Jefferys
The Olive Boy runs at Southwark Playhouse, Borough until Saturday 31 January.
