Men’s Business
Glass Mask Theatre at Bestseller, Dublin
★★★★☆
The Bestseller wine bar, on Dawson Street in Dublin, has undergone a shocking refurbishment. At one end is what appears to be a butcher’s shop, with sharp knives displayed against a wall of white tiles and large cuts of raw meat hanging from a rack. Either someone needs to call a health inspector or the resident theatre company has run amok.
Glass Mask has always been a model of economic shrewdness, so it comes as a thrill that its latest play, Men’s Business, by Simon Stephens, of which this is the world premiere, begins with a curtain slowly opening on an impressively built room striking in its sterility, its lights blinking in otherworldly blue against the garage-punk strains of The Hives.
We watch as Charlie, a butcher played by Lauren Farrell, cleaves a large piece of meat before, through miracles of set design, her countertop becomes a romantically set table. Talk about a glow-up.
Charlie’s dinner date is Victor, a builder played by Rex Ryan, who first appears like a kind of rock star, wearing a welding mask and using a lit torch. He seems to await being spoken to, and is inflexible while discussing women (he never visits them at home) and sexual education (“Knowing sucks the passion out of everything”).
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Soon after they sleep together, Victor unravels, suspecting that he has a threatening rival for her affections in the form of her dog, a sociable greyhound named Wolfie.
The original version of the play, first seen in 1972, was by the German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, who has a reputation as a sobering realist. This new translation by Stephens (Punk Rock, Sea Wall) seems to suspect more absurdist leanings. Victor’s cruelty may make Charlie think less of herself and her business, but the pair seem to be on a mutually agreed path towards oblivion. (“I’m trying to destroy you mentally,” he says. “It’s not that I’m not grateful,” she replies.)
That allows Ross Gaynor, the production’s director, to pivot away from an overly extreme depiction of abuse and perhaps towards a more offbeat study of relationships. We see Farrell’s face, smiling amusedly at Victor, drop into a picture of disappointment, dissatisfied with his performance. Ryan’s eyes widen, like those of a deer caught in headlights, as a vicious man listening to his girlfriend’s reasonable requests for respect is able only to exclaim, emptily, “You’re weird.”
That confirms the play as an ingenious satire about commitment issues in a world of warped relationships with sex. (Charlie is too ashamed by her Catholic upbringing to masturbate; Victor refuses to perform oral sex but expects to receive it.) The production can’t quite mask troublesome scene changes or deliver the stylised violence of the play’s conclusion, but it still packs a punch.
It’s the silent pauses that speak loudest (Kroetz’s next play had no words at all), as Charlie smiles over at Victor while he is dressing himself. He stares emotionlessly back. What a void behind those eyes.
Men’s Business is at Glass Mask, Dublin, until Saturday, March 1st, then runs at Finborough Theatre, London, from March 18th until April 12th
