Bed – A One Man Show is a monologue full of potential at Camden Fringe 2024 at the Hen & Chickens Theatre
“I don’t really like being told what to do”
Ben Donaghy’s Bed – A One Man Show arrives at the Camden Fringe as his second self-written, directed and performed play and whilst it may possibly have a significant structural issue, there’s enough potential in both writing and performance to suggest a bright future. Donaghy plays Boy, who we first meet in a Parisian hotel room, waiting for his boyfriend to come back from an errand, but is all as it seems?
A hotel bed dominates the stage, a tacit acknowledgement to Tracy Emin’s ‘My Bed’ as a key inspiration, and as we slide under the covers with Boy and his sinuous storytelling, witty way with a lip-synch and some flexible physicality, a slow sense of things being awry begins to percolate through each line. Issues of mental health creep to the fore as hidden truths of loneliness and isolation crack through the bright persona.
This aspect of the show hits hard, sensitively drawn but packing a powerful punch and resisting neat or easy resolution. Donaghy chooses to contrast it by weaving in stand-up sections at various intervals which disrupt (with a certain amount of interest) without really deepening the narrative, leaving an overall feeling of unevenness which perhaps an external director might be better able to navigate and address.
