Fringe favourites Belt Up return with their highly acclaimed The Boy James, now transferred to the entirely new venue of C Nova, where up several flights of stairs the audience is led into what feels like a cosy Victorian attic study. The pyjama-clad Boy has us take our seats around the edge of the room, plays a game of Wink Murder with us and then has us all close our eyes, with no peeking, for the entrance of James. It is this sort of flourish which makes a Belt Up show unique: by asking us to voluntarily hear James's first lines, but not see him deliver them, we are invited to engage our imaginations: become children ourselves, audience members becoming active performers in this strange, pre-adolescent fantasy land.
The play is concerned with the relationship between the inner child and the outer adult, drawing on the life of Peter Pan creator JM Barrie to give us a rather disturbing image of the “boy who never grew up” within James. The arrival of a girl from the park into the cosy atmosphere of play that the Boy shares with the adult James introduces a fevered, terrifying sexuality along with the poisonous threat of alcohol. But what are the audience meant to garner from all this?
This being my second Belt Up show, I applaud whole-heartedly the innovative, immersive dramatic methods used, but I'm still unconvinced as to the value of the stories they have chosen to tell. The ghosts of ideas are certainly there: a male fear of female sexuality, a longing for the simple life of childhood to return – but they aren't interrogated, and the ideas remain a series of metaphors that hang in front of the audience to be taken or left. I never truly felt that I knew much about the subject of the drama, which given Barrie's eventful personal life is a shame. And if the audience is uninformed about the subject matter, they'll struggle to take away a great deal; you won't learn much about Barrie here.
That said, I will always enjoy any play that gives a significant monologue to an audience member to recite. Anyone interested in theatre will be interested in this piece, but Belt Up still need to work on their scripts before good theatre becomes a good play.
