With the astoundingly talented and acclaimed Sally Cookson at the helm and a script by Ross Willis, Wonderboy exploded out of the Bristol Old Vic back in 2022 and recently embarked on a national tour already nabbing the Writer’s Guild Award for Best Play 2023. It’s a hotly anticipated ticket with a huge reputation behind it. But many shows with a tidal wave of hype rarely live up to the noise – will this one?
Captain Chatter is the comic book superhero who helps our own hero, reclusive Sonny, with his self-conscious stammer which constrains him from making small talk, sharing thoughts and ideas and most of all speaking to an audience. And then he finds himself cast in the school production of Hamlet!
90 minutes whizzes by and for all those minutes the teenage audience (the demographic it is clearly targeting) remains enrapt. The story of Sonny and his attempts to overcome his condition is endearing and full of bright and engaging surprises. The language is coarse and the audience is delighted with occasional F word.
The text is displayed throughout behind the actors and adds to the clarity of the tale and the wondrous buzz words and semi-rap dialogue of Ross Willis – dialogue which also contains the best Hamlet summary you’ll ever hear. Samir Mahat is Sonny and has an awesome responsibility to portray the stammering character with precision and empathy (despite the fact he’s stab a fellow pupil in the eye with a fork) and he delivers his role adroitly supported by the silent and signing Captain Chatter (who ironically) says nothing played by Ciaran O’Breen. Naia Elliot-Spence is splendid as the garrulous Roshi (she of the Hamlet outline). But the real drama is shared between Jessica Murrain (as Ms Fish) and Eva Scott (as Ms Wainwright) whose wicked sparring form a substantive dramatic spine to the piece.
Willis’ script is splattered with words of all hues (many shared between teachers and pupils) and the target audience was occasionally aghast to hear them. The laughter they induce is perhaps relied a little too often. Where the script really flies is its ersatz-poetry and semi-rapping prose which sends the play onto a different plain. It is earthy and dirty but also blissfully poetic – the impact of which is doubled by having the words literally spelled out before us. Clearly this will end up as a studied text on curriculum and perhaps even performed in a bowdlerised version in schools. It makes you wonder, boy…
Reviewer: Peter Kinnock
Reviewed: 2nd October 2024
North West End UK Rating:
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