Learning to live

Mad(e) at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, from January 26 to 28. Review by JON LEWIS

Yasmin Sidhwa’s poignant production of Sean Burn’s new play Mad(e) explores issues of male mental health based on hours of interviews with respondents across the country.

It’s a vibrant, stridently poetic drama that blends a primal, spiritual and earthy wisdom with a sensitivity that explores the worries and hopes of young men from Generation Z.

Three young men who could easily have floundered in today’s consumerism live on the edges and margins of society. X.o.dus (Nelvin Kiratu, graduating from Mandala’s youth company to the professional one) is an undocumented refugee from Africa whose family are dead. We see flashbacks to his past demonstrating his induction by his grandmother into the world of cooking, the one love of his life. There are scenes where he pretends he is his grandmother, tricking his father into spontaneous acts of love towards him, and learns erroneously that love is a feminine trait alone.

The dreadlocked Kei (Max McMillan Ngwenya) is gay, ridiculed by friends and family for his gender orientation and forced into life on the streets, finding shelter wrapped in his sleeping bag in a cemetery. His gentleness is contrasted with beery gangs of youths chanting ‘Carlsberg’, who exude traits of public toxic masculinity.

The third of the trio is Ash (Lex Stephenson), initially homophobic and racist, mourning the loss of a friend who died jumping off a bridge. He carries an urn with the friend’s ashes that keeps his memory fresh, a constant ache in his soul. He is haunted, taunted even, by England football-flag touting louts, alienated and floundering amongst his peers.

It takes the presence of a native goddess, the spirit of winter Beira (Charisse Zamba), a deity meaningful to the two characters with an African heritage as well as to locals with Celtic roots, to suggest a path to a future of love and self-healing. With homilies, sociological insights and lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, each of the boys is re-animated. In one memorable scene, two of the lads are comically depicted as ventriloquist dummies, but with Beira’s interventions they can live purposefully, no strings attached.

Recommended.