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Brawn review – a half-formed play about toxic male self-image

“What we are showing here is important,” says Christopher Wollaton at the end of this 50-minute play about male body dysmorphia, obsessive exercise and disordered eating. He is absolutely right; as both its writer and sole performer, his monologue grapples with issues around masculinity, mental health and skewed self-image that are not often spoken aloud.

A young man called Ryan is holed up in his family garage with a pair of free weights and a display of ripped bodies from men’s magazines on a back wall. He talks to us about his life – the plan to study physics that went wrong, the girl he fancied at school who fell for a brawnier guy and taunts for being “lanky”. All of which has led him here, fixating on his muscle mass and gunning for a physical perfection that makes up for the unfulfilled dreams, or so he tells himself.

Directed by Elliot Taylor, Wollaton has a vulnerable intensity on stage, shirtless for the most part and breaking off for bursts of physical exercise. But despite his very compelling performance, the show feels beached by its lack of plot. It is a character study whose drama rests on backstory, exposition and a narrative that is little more than the ghosting of a girlfriend.

The production is frustrating and promising in equal measure: the script is well written, with the potential to build towards a much more dynamic play. There are powerful moments when Ryan stands in front of an invisible mirror and speaks in affirmations that come to seethe with desperation and hollowness: “I am handsome”, “You’ve got this”. But it all feels like a good, strong background study for a play rather than the play itself.

But it is refreshing to see the subject dramatised with such passion. The poet Andrew McMillan has explored similar ground with delicacy and lyricism in poems such as The Men Are Weeping in the Gym. Ryan seems preoccupied by power, channelled through the aesthetics of his muscle-bound form. Women like men who are physically strong, he tells himself, though we get the sense that he is competing with, and proving himself to, the men around him. It is a wounded and obsessive picture of young heterosexual manhood and we do walk away feeling this is an important show, albeit in chrysalis.