Following a smash-hit sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival, Penelope Skinner’s Fringe-First award winning play Angry Alan now transfers to Soho Theatre. This darkly comic play about masculinity in crisis is written and directed by multi-award-winning playwright Penelope Skinner (The Village Bike, Royal Court Theatre; Linda, Royal Court and Manhattan Theatre Club) and cocreated and performed by Donald Sage Mackay (True West, Vaudeville Theatre; Deep State, Fox TV; Linda, Manhattan Theatre Club).
Looking out over the country, this country, where I was born and raised, I wonder what’s going to become of us. Because this can’t be the future, can it? Everyone just… changing the rules?
Roger thinks the world’s gone mad. He hates his job, his ex-wife torments him and to top it all, his girlfriend just discovered feminism. Roger’s about to lose his shit. Until he discovers Angry Alan: online activist and ‘voice of reason’…
In 2016, in the wake of Trump’s election, Penelope Skinner was inspired to write a play about the anger which is dominating today’s political landscape. In doing so she stumbled across the Men’s Right’s Movement and, along with American actor Donald Sage Mackay, began creating Angry Alan, a story about Roger, an ordinary American man being radicalised online by an extremist movement. Angry Alan explores how any extreme political viewpoint can take root in someone’s consciousness if they are vulnerable to it and how those who propagate such views may not be all that they seem.
Penelope Skinner and Donald Sage Mackay comment, We were delighted with the response to Angry Alan in Edinburgh and are so pleased to be coming to the Soho Theatre. Soho feels like the perfect home for this piece. And in this fraught and polarised political climate, we are grateful for the opportunity to keep telling this story.
Angry Alan is at Soho Theatre 5th to 30th March 2019.
