BWW Reviews: BOYS' LIFE, King's Head Theatre, June 2 2013

The New York of the late 80s, was a good place to be a guy. (So was London - believe me). Student debts? Unemployment for professionals? Austerity? All pretty much unknown. There was always another little Italian recently opened up in that up-and-coming gastro-quarter of ex-industrial buildings that had simply the best tiramisu in town. So - Saturday? 8.00ish? See you there.

But lurking under that seductive exterior of cosmopolitan conviviality was the makings of a crisis in masculinity, one that had been developing since the early 70s. Women's Lib and then feminism, allied to poet-industrialisation, had given women - well, young professional women - the confidence and financial power to have exactly that conversation with a man. With women beginning to call the shots (and soon to be drinking the shots too) what were the alpha males to do?

Howard Korder's Boys' Life is set in that moment, 25 years ago, when "It's complicated" began to become the default mode for thirtysomethings' relationships. Three lads, college pals, are unsettled in their Big Apple apartments. Jack (Max Warrick) has a wife whose career is so sucessful that he can spend the afternoons sitting in the park, chatting up passing joggers, but he craves somewhere to take them for a little illicit afternoon hanky-panky. He's certainly not good, but he hasn't the balls to be really bad - and his wife knows it. Phil (Luke Trebilcock) is stuck in an Axl Rose influenced perpetual adolescence, confessing love for women he barely knows and passing out on the booze and drugs he takes to escape his failures. Don (Matthew Crowley) meets what turns into the (literal) girl of his dreams, Lisa (Anna Brooks-Beckman) - a kind of ultra-assertive Annie Hall - and eventually ends up with her, having found that the old life just isn't enough, even if the new one isn't all that either.

Boys' Life is a tough play to stage - there's lots of stuff going on and off stage and the action is mainly just conversations and passive aggression - but director Sebastien Blanc solves the problems with a wonderful selection of pin-sharp 80s pop hits to fill the dark interludes in this one act all-through production. Having transferred from the Etcetera Theatre, where it ran in the spring, the show is about as slick as ever it could be. The three male leads and their on-off girlfriends are all good, but two cameos from Greg Blackford as a dumped boyfriend waiting for his coat at a terrible party and Charlotte Gascoyne as Don's last, loopy, fling are superbly conceived and delivered. There's plenty of laughter - albeit in the dark (yep, literally).

Does it matter in 2013? Well, I once heard someone say that one of the hopes of feminism was to make men more like women (in touch with their feelings, more caring, more supportive of their fellow men). Instead feminism turned out to make women more like men (more aggressive, more prone to binge drinking and more selfish). A glance at any reality TV show or youth icons will show that some (if not all) of that is true. Boys' Life explores why it's turning out that way showing that if men and women are ever to stand equal, stand happy and stand fulfilled, men will have to change too. And there hasn't been much sign of that in the 25 years since Jack, Phil and Don fought their corner against the encroachment of confident women into their complacently successful, if unfulfilling, boys' lives.

Boys' Life continues at the King's Head Theatre until 23 June.

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