Certified Male
Certified Male digs deep into the modern male psyche
| 18 Aug 2007
Les Dennis’ meandering career takes another twist, courtesy of his brilliant turn on Ricky Gervais' Extras as a failing entertainer in terrified midlife crisis, co-incidentally called Les Dennis. In Certified Male, he plays a failing executive in terrified midlife crisis, called McBride, but occasionally referred to as ‘Les.’
Pleasing enough, this is commercial theatre at its most average, being the morally questionable tale of three men taken on a team-building weekend by homily-loving boss Jarrad. The trio fish and golf, and when things go wrong they bemoan their terrible lives, bond over mutual reassurance and sing an occasional song: “Never gonna fall down (again)” is a typical lyric. I think we're supposed to laugh and sometimes cry, but when one character turns out to be riddled with cancer, you just know they aren’t trying hard enough.
Funnily enough, the production’s redemption is in the supreme technical abilities of its four actors. There is barely a prop in sight. A whole world is mimed and voiced, from the whip of an angling rod to the fuzzle of a cappuccino dispenser, and the result is not naturalism, but a dainty, homosocial reality where everything is mechanically just so. Delightfully, this is at odds with the play’s premise – that straight, uncomplicated, masculinity will sort itself out, given space and time and enough rounds of golf – and the result is a show of great physical delicacy that betters its unsophisticated script.
Pleasing enough, this is commercial theatre at its most average, being the morally questionable tale of three men taken on a team-building weekend by homily-loving boss Jarrad. The trio fish and golf, and when things go wrong they bemoan their terrible lives, bond over mutual reassurance and sing an occasional song: “Never gonna fall down (again)” is a typical lyric. I think we're supposed to laugh and sometimes cry, but when one character turns out to be riddled with cancer, you just know they aren’t trying hard enough.
Funnily enough, the production’s redemption is in the supreme technical abilities of its four actors. There is barely a prop in sight. A whole world is mimed and voiced, from the whip of an angling rod to the fuzzle of a cappuccino dispenser, and the result is not naturalism, but a dainty, homosocial reality where everything is mechanically just so. Delightfully, this is at odds with the play’s premise – that straight, uncomplicated, masculinity will sort itself out, given space and time and enough rounds of golf – and the result is a show of great physical delicacy that betters its unsophisticated script.