Charlie Howard shows much promise in his one-man-show Jock, at the Golden Goose Theatre
“I am desperate to be a part of something. To belong.”
There’s something mildly amusing about setting up a pub set in the backroom of an actual pub but as you navigate through the Golden Goose pub to the Golden Goose Theatre for Jock, there’s your man standing at the bar, onstage pub tables available to sit at for those unafraid of a little immersive staging. In his boat shoes and purple socks, rumpled shirt and club tie, it is easy to have preconceptions about who this jock is but as with so much good theatre, the narrative confounds them, leaving you wondering if you should have bought that pint just before the show started or not….
Charlie Howard is the writer and performer here, spinning off his own memories of his time trying to fit in as part of a hard-partying rugby society at university and contemplating its very real costs on his body and soul – toxic masculinity in the very real sense of the word. From the disorientation and unknown excitement of hazing rituals to the indoctrination in a culture that prizes heavy drinking above all else, doling out casual cruelty with ease, whether to fellow members, the girls they seek to add to their ‘body count’, to the new initiates coming up behind them, ensuring the cyclical repetition of these practices.
Given the subject matter and the kind of personnel it covers, Howard’s writing perhaps inevitably tends towards the prosaic, though moments of real poetry do peek through in some of the rare, truly reflective moments. For the real focus is on the rogues gallery of straight masculine archetypes encountered on this odyssey, brought to life with some skilful characterisation from Howard and assisted by some game audience participation to flesh out the unique niche of this dress-wearing, Reebok-loving, milk-chugging world, hedonism to the power of ten and leaving you glad you’re not in the same pub as them all.
Ramiro Batista’s direction does well to craft something beyond the standard one-man-show, that audience participation amusingly done. That said, given much of the audience’s familiarity with Howard – only natural on opening night – it would be interesting to see and hear the response of a crowd not quite so raucously appreciative of every in-jokes and familiar character. It did make it trickier to really gauge the material on its own merits, to see whether something so specific really works on the universal level too.
Howard impressed enough though to make me want to see if he can connect as well to an audience of strangers and there’s something admirable in the shaping of his play in entirely avoiding overdramatics in pursuit of more essential truth. On this evdience, a voice to watch out for.
