Review: THE BOY, Soho Theatre

Before we even start, The Boy is bouncing about, playing invisible drums, bursting with the energy that pre-teens burst with, the one we’d very much like to get back now we’re pre-retirees. He’s either going to irritate us for the next 70 minutes or charm us - mercifully, it’s the latter.

Joakim Daun’s new play, directed by Maria Jose Andrade, two of many migrants who have worked on this production, chronicles the first year or two of the boy’s new life in a new country speaking a new language and acquiring two new parents. It takes a while to find its feet, but it leaves you keen to find out what happens next to our three damaged individuals battling in an unsympathetic world.

Eve von Elgg brings a (dare I say?) boyish charm to the kid, frightened but bright, curious but wary, longing to be loved, but cautious of those who reach out. The young actor holds the play together - one false move, one knowing look, one step with the weight of an adult and not the weightlessness of an eight year-old, and the many levels of artifice on stage would collapse. It’s a very fine performance indeed from a recent graduate, training in Covid times and making their way in a cost-of-living crisis.

Jerome Ngonadi and Shereen Roushbaiani have tougher gigs (on stage at least), multi-rolling adult characters that don’t quite add up. The man who befriends the boy as they each flee from the horrors of war and becomes a kind of stepfather and the woman of significant wealth who is grieving a lost child of her own, never form fully in a script that explores the administrative and personal nightmare of seeking asylum but skates over the issues of safeguarding and adoption. Neither character has quite enough backstory to warrant their unusual and tricky decisions which have the air of expediency when they should carry the heft of life-changing new directions.

This ever-present narrative fuzziness is partly the result of a decision to identify neither the home country of the boy nor the one to which he flees. Of course, that lends a universality to the migrant story, but it makes for clunky circumlocutions in the dialogue and a tone that shifts from a UK, even London vibe to a US, even Texas vibe. (The new mother’s house feels like it might be on Parliament Hill, but the journey to it sounds more like the bus travelling to Ciudad Juárez).

The play’s careful setting up and heartfelt justification of a family that is fractured in so many ways but somehow holds together, is, to some extent, wasted as many of the issues are settled offstage and presented as solved or unsolved but manageable. That adds to the slightly unsatisfactory conclusion, as I cannot be alone in wanting to know how the parents-not-parents and the boy on his way to assimilation, get on in the next stage of their lives.

Despite those flaws, Daun gets plenty of humour and warmth into his script and leaves nobody in any doubt about a system that is loaded against the most vulnerable and needy, but one that can, with luck and a lad with so much to offer, give just enough for a kid to bloom. The boy will do okay - and, I hope, we might see him doing exactly that in a sequel that Eve von Elgg’s charismatic creation surely deserves.     

The Boy is at Soho Theatre until 4 November

Photo Credits: TerraCityOne

To post a comment, you must register and login.