If you’re someone who enjoys crass, puerile humour, then Bouncers will appeal to your tastes. If you’re someone who has an inclination towards decency and a degree of intelligence in their comedy, then you will find this play vile.Bouncers is set over the course of a Friday night, following three groups of people – a party of women celebrating a 21st birthday, a group of lads out on the ‘raz’, and the bouncers themselves – as they all converge upon the Mr Cinders nightclub. Aside from a few sexual innuendos, a couple of fights and a few urine-orientated jokes, it’s difficult to imagine much more material being extracted from the night club format that hasn’t already been covered by Phoenix Nights. It seems the play’s writer, John Godber, struggled to think of anything else either.The play sells itself as ‘instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever been part of the club scene’. Certainly, there are elements recognisable from any night out in a big city - the pulsating music, the occasional grind, unctuous bouncers, and a threatening atmosphere – but simply noting these down and presenting them to a sober audience (and how I wish I was inebriated) can hardly be considered worthy of an hour’s stage-time.Further, I cannot remember the last time I was in a club populated solely by the octogenarian cast of Coronation Street. The cheap and unoriginal use of northern accents and northern stereotyping becomes hackneyed very quickly. Godber’s plays, the programme tells us, ‘are well known for their use of northern accents and dialect’- but even if he is from Yorkshire himself, it is a travesty that he has been allowed to lazily exploit this prejudice for so long.Sexual innuendos are rife within this production. I quickly became bored at the erection jokes, lost hope as one actor hunched in a corner of the stage pretending to masturbate rapidly, and grew contemptuous at the Swedish-themed porn film re-enactment (Godber again using that slightly xenophobic gimmick of poking fun at accents). The less said about the vulgar scene where the bouncers rent out a Postman Pat video because it contains a ‘pussy’, the better.It is difficult to know what this play wants to be. If the show is trying to provide a profound social commentary – which at certain points it certainly attempts to do – then it defeats itself with its own insincerity and churlishness. If this play is attempting to be a satire then one has to ask, with shows such as Geordie Shore and The Only Way is Essex (programmes beyond satire) already exhibiting the worst of social behaviour, what use could Bouncers serve? As it is, this play wouldn’t even be fit as a sordid addition to the Carry On series.
