Lenny, also known as ‘big man’ by his best friend Carly is soon to be turning 30. Living with flatmates he doesn’t like, a job that fulfills him with no purpose and a huge burning desire to be loved. Written and performed by Alfie Webster and directed by Sarah Stacey, this 80-minute piece travels through the usual spots Lenny exists like the cinema, a nightclub, the nightclub’s cubicle and back in his room where even there he struggles to take up space. But on this particular day he is haunted by a dream, in which he had sex with a banana. This unravels him completely as he realises his own loneliness. His mission becomes clear, to prove the banana wrong and make sense of who he is.
Location to location, Webster invites us into his lens of life. He finds humour in almost anything mundane, calling out the abstract ways in how people live, giving light to the parts we think are shyly hidden. In Lenny feeling like an outsider, he becomes a ‘watcher’, maybe trying to gain clues on how to do life right? The audience being a watcher of Lenny, it is incredibly sweet and also slightly refreshing to hear how lost someone else might be feeling too.
We meet the people that matter most, his best friend Carly. Webster manipulates his voice to a slow, sarcastic tone. Once being naive and fluttery, now a direct and dominant young woman speaking to Lenny through conversation, Carly is now on this stage. Webster’s control of movement between to voices is honestly some of the best multi-rolling work I’ve ever seen, often it can be a tool that feels sticky and tentative but with Webster, it is completely satisfying and beautifully soft throughout the circle of conversation.
Carly travels along with us until a huge pivotal moment, an argument that can quite possibly end the friendship forever. We hear Carly’s real voice for the first time played through a voice note. We see the real truth to their friendship, not just from Lenny’s view and it is a bombshell like no other. This moment really highlights Webster’s incredible storytelling, having the audience follow so blindly to a person’s innocence only to be left questioning who really is the ‘good guy’ here.
We are also introduced to Lenny’s love interest, a stoic artist looking for his muse but when their friendship is just about to dip over the edge into romance, the artist pulls away leaving Lenny ultimately more alone than ever before. At this point, Lenny is left feeling like this only way forward is to become the ‘big man’ everyone expects him to be.
We end with Lenny not so much happy, but at peace with finding himself. I’m left with the quote ‘I don’t make sense’ and find a great resonance with this feeling and so must many others. This is a beautiful exploration of forgiveness of oneself and of others, for not showing up the ways people expect of you and equally forgiving others for not being how you need them to be.
It is so refreshing to see such a complex, interesting piece of theatre and to leave hopeful that new writing will continue to grace our theatres.
Reviewer: Alice Rose
Reviewed: 19th September 2025
North West End UK Rating: