In his 1997 book I Don’t Want To Talk About It: Overcoming The Secret Legacy Of Male Depression, family therapist Terrence Real pointed out the differences between how girls and boys think about their gender. When researchers asked girls to describe what it meant to be feminine, girls generally responded with positive attributes like compassion and communication skills. But boys, when asked to describe masculinity, responded more often with double negatives. Real writes:
“Boys and men do not talk about being strong so much as not being weak. They do not list independence so much as not being dependent. They did not speak about being close to their fathers so much as about pulling away from their mothers. ... Masculine identity development turns out to be not a process of development at all, but rather a process of elimination, a successive unfolding of loss.“
This quote could arguably serve as an epigraph for Mad(e), a new production that kicked off its national tour Wednesday night at The North Wall, written by Sean Burn and co-created with boys and young men nationally. While in the last 25 years, things have arguably improved in terms of the range and depth of emotion society deems appropriate for men and boys to show, Mad(e) allows for no illusions that this is not still a huge issue for today’s youth.
The plot of Mad(e) somewhat chaotically blends grim realism with surreality. Its frenzied tale follows three lads all battling serious troubles - Ash (Lex Stephenson), X.o.dus (Nelvin Kiratu), and Kei (Max McMillan Ngwenya) - who are offered guidance and galvanisation from a mythical female shapeshifter called Beira (Clarisse Zamba), also known as the Goddess of Winter.
If this addition sounds oddly disconnected from the themes of the plot - that’s how it felt as well. I couldn’t make heads or tails of Beira’s metaphoric force in the story - is she meant to represent a maternal presence? The other character’s own repressed self-compassion? Or is she supposed to be accepted more literally as a higher power?
All three main characters are traumatized - Ash by his best mate’s needless death and his role in it, X.o.dus by the frequently cruel and senseless immigration system in the UK, and Kei by his father’s homophobic bullying, and his own resulting homelessness. Their stories are slowly unravelled in a frenzied fragmented series of vignettes, interspersed with dancing, slam poetry, and haunting repetitions of football chants and other macho rhetoric.
The stage design is intentionally scruffy - a tissue paper and board tree that could be straight out of a school play overturned crates as tables and chairs. You can tell the piece was workshopped with actual teenagers as the slang the characters use is current and effortlessly worked into the material. Directed by Yasmin Sidhwa, the founder of the social justice-oriented theatre company Mandala, the performances are enthused and moving to witness.
However, the show wears its heart on its sleeve and maybe a bit too sincere and obvious for some. I think the place I felt Mad(e) was at its weakest was when it came to plotting. Billed as an ‘Epic story of life, death and everything in between’ in fact, it felt more like three piercing portraits, stitched together haphazardly to try and form an overarching narrative. I found myself wishing it had embraced either its small but deeply real stories or blended them more wholeheartedly into a fantastical, surreal adventure.
That said, there are some vignettes that hit with a punch of pure brilliance - one involving a fake quiz show, another of X.o.dus recalling the stifling way manhood was pushed onto him as a child, a heartbreaking recollection of Ash’s. Mad(e) may be messy and at times cacophonous, but it’s also no doubt a moving and important piece of art.