Not a Game for Boys, King’s Head Theatre, N1

reviewed for The Times, 1 July 2015

Can anyone remember a time when masculinity wasn’t in crisis? Twenty years ago, the Royal Court was already in on the act, programming an influential run of new plays exploring what the playwright David Edgar called “masculinity and its discontents”. Next to visceral landmarks such as Jez Butterworth’s Mojo (betrayal and dismemberment in 1950s Soho) and Anthony Neilson’sPenetrator (that’s anal penetration, with a knife), Not a Game for Boys hardly seems the pick of the bunch.

It’s lighter on the violence and eschews the homoerotica, which may be why old-school comedian Bobby Davro has chosen it as a safe comeback vehicle. Safe or not, Simon Block’s three-hander still deserves better than a poor man’s Jim Davidson. And Davro’s charismatic but one-note performance as Eric, the solipsist bully badgering his team of washed-up cab drivers towards table-tennis glory, flattens the dark humour that made the original soar.

Like Patrick Marber’s contemporaneous Dealer’s Choice, Not a Game for Boys revolves around a game played between men. Here, it’s not poker that’s at stake, but the decidedly less macho table tennis, which may be why misogynistic Eric is so keen to overcompensate.

Block doesn’t use the metaphors and tensions of the game to its full advantage — the table tennis motif provides little more than the play’s structure, with each of the three acts consisting of one of the triads of the tournament’s nine-game framework. Instead of watching the game, we sit in the locker room, listening in.

Eric is wilfully ignoring his mother’s descent into dementia; Oscar (Alan Drake) is preoccupied by the death of a fellow player (is table tennis really worth it?) and commitment-phobic Tony (an endearingly earnest Oliver Joel) really should be at home, saving the wreck of his relationship with the long-suffering Lisa.

Yet none of this off-screen drama makes much of an impact. Eric’s long telephone calls home, barking orders to his wife on how to terrorise his mother into submission, should be our window on to his vulnerability — instead, Davro is as masked and impenetrable as ever. And if Jason Lawson’s production runs at a mere 85 minutes, it’s because Davro canters through his cues like a man who’s never heard of the concepts of pace or pause.

Given that the Neighbours star Mark Little was the one weak link in the King’s Head’s previous production, the otherwise brilliant Shock Treatment, perhaps it’s time for this theatre to lose the stunt casting.