ajhlovestheatre

FEELING AFRAID AS IF SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN

by Marcelo Dos Santos

Directed by Matthew Xia

Bush Theatre, London – until 23 December 2023

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/feeling-afraid-as-if-something-terrible-is-going-to-happen/

Here’s a pre-Christmas treat to freeze the cockles of your heart. Rightfully acclaimed and sold out at last year’s Edinburgh Festival and now ensconced at the Bush Theatre for a six week run, Marcelo Dos Santos’s hour long solo play is an exhilarating exercise in zestful nihilism, elevated by a truly astonishing central performance by Samuel Barnett.

Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen is presented like a stand-up comedy routine, one where the unnamed comedian (Barnett) stops and starts, snarls and kvetches, as he filters his existential crisis through a selection of modern day gay neuroses that are likely to strike a chord in many onlookers. He gives us emotional disconnection to the point of sociopathy, slavish worship of the body beautiful, feelings of ongoing inadequacy, the mixed blessings of online connections, self hatred and more… it’s mostly blisteringly funny, and when it isn’t, it’s just blistering.

The subject matter really isn’t that original, but the treatment is, especially in Matthew Xia’s stylish, technically adroit production. The design (Kat Heath), lighting (Elliot Griggs) and sound (Max Pappenheim) are spare and elegant but get flashy when they need to be. The comedian’s microphone is used like a weapon or a defence as Barnett screams and sasses into it, and the isolated moments where he puts it aside to speak, or sob, acoustically are powerfully telling.

The central character is desperate to be loved: he even puts a smiley face on a mental health questionnaire where he makes some startlingly dark admissions, in the hope of getting his therapist (“not a real therapist…a nice girl from the NHS with no detectable shoulders”) to like him. His problem, or at least a big part of it, is that he doesn’t even like himself very much. Barnett’s performance and Dos Santos’s writing do a remarkable collective job of conveying a person whose propensity for self-sabotage is immense, and who uses his undeniable wit as a constant form of self-defence. In all honesty, he’s not easy to like, despite the humour and the sometimes painful vulnerability that peeps through the motor-mouthed sarcasm, but that’s not really the point. He’s certainly thrilling theatrical company. When he gets into a sort-of relationship with an American hunk who seems too-good-to-be-true until it’s revealed that he has a medical condition that potentially makes him an unlikely match for a comedian, it’s clear that the wheels are going to come off, and part of the grim fun to be had is in predicting how that might happen (it’s pretty surprising but not entirely implausible).

Barnett is one of the most immediately likeable actors of his generation, possessed of an open-faced warmth, relatability and understated fragility that compellingly draws you in. Given that, it’s all the more astounding how much he disappears into the damaged, devious, wired figure at the heart of this play. He almost alters himself physiognomically, which of course isn’t possible especially at such close quarters but such is the magic of theatre and this electrifying performance. He’s hilarious and edgy, but when the mask of sardonic comic confession slips, he’s truly devastating. He also offers skilful brief but vivid sketches of the other figures in the comedian’s life.

Dos Santos’s script has a laser sharp precision and brilliantly walks a tightrope between comic showboating and laying bare the despair at the heart of so many super-busy youngish urbanites whose frantic activity may just be an attempt to keep the darkness at bay. It achieves a lot in a short space of time, and almost feels like it’s invoking a modern day, gay British Lenny Bruce. It’s frequently borderline obscene, and proves a much more satisfying piece of work than the same author’s current West End hit Backstairs Billy. Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen is brutal and brilliant, with a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers long after the sixty five minute playing time is over. Just go.