Orlan Theatre Company’s BROS at Pleasance Theatre London offers a complex yet humorous and deeply humane take on modern masculinity through female bodies. Written by Iona Champain and Matilda McCarthy and directed by Hana Pascal Keegan, it uses drag to explore male friendship, grief and suicide over one night in one room.
Iona Champain plays Will, a seeming man-child still living in the past in a bare rented flat. There is an old sofa, a crate probably picked up from the street as a side table, and a long-dead plant as the only attempt at decoration. Old friends were due to gather to remember Tuna, the nickname for their friend who died by suicide a year ago, but the night does not go to plan. Some have married and have children; some have simply bailed. They drift apart as their twenties are left behind. Everyone has moved on except Will.
Matilda McCarthy’s Mouser plays the role of an adult, arriving straight from the office in a Canada Goose vest and red tie, bragging about big contracts. He badly wants to feel important, yet memories of teenage fun keep resurfacing. He is torn between loyalty to Will, whose mental health declined after Tuna’s death, and the ending of an intimate relationship in which he is still learning what respect and boundaries mean. Olly, now a father, appears only briefly on a video call to introduce his baby.
The best thing about BROS is how the two mirror each other. Their paths differ on the surface, but unprocessed grief surfaces as anger in both. In one powerful scene, after yet another call from his girlfriend, Mouser bends silver spoons and hurls them across the stage, an outburst that is funny and painful at once.
Champain and McCarthy are superb together. The gestures and movement are utterly convincing, the jokes land on the beat and the floor wrestling, shaped by movement director Alexander Uzoka, is perfectly timed. They feel like friends who grew up together, and they bring real humour to both the toxic and the positive sides of masculinity. The audience can feel the research behind the show, drawn from conversations with men about their mental health and the social expectations that come with turning thirty, and distilled into a one-hour fringe production.
Women playing men for all characters is rarely seen on stage, and BROS is a brilliant example of what that can reveal about the complexity of masculinity. It meets men in their twenties, struggling to become someone before thirty, with great empathy, while mourning those like Tuna who never reached it.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
