ajhlovestheatre

I’M GONNA MARRY YOU TOBEY MAGUIRE

by Samantha Hurley

directed by Tyler Struble

Southwark Playhouse Borough- The Little, London – until 24 August 2024

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/im-gonna-marry-you-tobey-maguire/

This cultish off-Broadway smash feels like what would happen if you put angsty teenage fan fiction, the off-kilter humane intellectualism of Will Eno and the zany/gritty aesthetic of John Waters into a blender: it’s sometimes cute but more often absolutely lethal, and sometimes impenetrable. Samantha Hurley’s jet black tragicomedy arrives at Southwark with its original star (the genuinely remarkable Tessa Albertson), director (Tyler Struble) and set designer (Rodrigo Hernandez Martinez), and proves less whimsical and considerably darker than its title, and indeed its scenic design, might suggest.

Hernandez Martinez has turned the Southwark Little space into a fairy-lit, atmospheric, all-encompassing shrine to Tobey Maguire, the Spiderman star (yes, there was another Spidey before Tom Holland) is literally everywhere: he’s plastered all over the walls, on posters, magazine covers, in a giant framed portrait. He’s also physically on stage in the person of Anders Hayward, who looks enough like the screen star to get away with playing him (just about), but is, rather alarmingly, handcuffed to a metal pole centre stage. Maguire has been abducted and he, along with this cornucopia of images of him, is in the basement of teenager Shelby (Albertson) who is taking extreme fandom to new heights, or rather depths.

What Hurley has created is a frequently funny but more often disturbing look at obsession, youthful alienation and the consequences of neglect. Shelby, in Albertson’s detailed, screechily go-for-broke performance, is clearly deeply troubled. She has a combative relationship with her unseen (but very much heard) mom, a non-existent one with her absent, lawbreaking father, and is the victim of school bullying. She’s not necessarily easy to like, but neither is she easy to write off. Albertson gives her a wild, restless energy tempered with moments of hollow-eyed despair; she’s emotionally immature, disconcertingly sexual at times, and extremely smart. It’s the intelligence that actor and writer give Shelby that renders her misplaced devotion to Tobey and the dysfunctional loneliness of her existence, so sad. It also makes her dangerous.

Albertson never sentimentalises Shelby’s struggles, has wonderful comic instincts (“I’ve seen Misery” she sullenly tells Maguire at one point) and fully inhabits the character’s lightning fast changes in mood and focus: it’s an exhausting but multi-faceted performance, that constantly threatens to go slightly too far but never quite does: she’s brilliant. Hayward’s Tobey convincingly goes through the various stages of being held hostage, Stockholm syndrome apparently being the predominant one in this instance. He skilfully manages a rather pointless audience participation section, but can’t disguise the fact that the role feels underwritten in comparison with his captor. Kyle Birch is gorgeously funny as Brenda Dee Cankles, a cartoonish real estate agent who’s a jolly amalgam of every Strong Black Woman cliché, but performed with such life-affirming over-the-top relish that it’s hard to take offence. Birch also doubles improbably but gloriously as an impish Toby Maguire alter ego who bursts through the walls at regular intervals to mock, or commiserate with, the stricken screen star.

Struble’s staging is in tune with the eccentricities of Hurley’s script, but sometimes doesn’t feel punchy or pacy enough. The writing and the premise suggest that the piece should come at us with a furious urgency, but too often here the show seems a little hesitant and languid. Ultimately, beyond the not-terribly-original revelation that parasocial relationships and teenage obsession make toxic bedfellows, it’s hard to grasp what Hurley’s point is with this strange, overlong combination of soured sitcom, psychological thriller and rampant absurdism. I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire provides equal amounts of good, nasty fun and “wtf is going on” bewilderment, but it does at least feel refreshingly original.