CONTENT WARNING: this show addresses a lot of difficult topics in an extremely harmful and offensive way, including disability, child abuse, bullying, gender identity, and neurodivergence. Please be aware that I will be detailing some of the ways in which this happened, including ableism, transphobia, and discriminatory language. If anyone would like to chat to me about this show or if there’s a safer way for me to communicate with you about the contents please feel free to reach out to me here.

As a reviewer I have seen all sorts of theatre, and I really enjoy the challenge of picking out the things that I enjoyed from even the most dire of performances, however I didn’t even get the chance to try that here. I’ve only ever left a show before the end (for reasons other than illness) once and I never thought I would for a show I was reviewing, but when a production causes me to feel this deeply uncomfortable and disturbed to witness, then I guess there’s a first time for everything.

The show markets itself as a series of poems written by Mark Tunstall, put to music with dialogue in between to form musical, but there was no cohesive story running through any of it. I hugely struggled to follow what was happening, and the set was a mish-mash of unidentifiable structures and random pieces of artwork that didn’t seem to have any tangible link to the story or setting, but by the end of act one it had been stated that we were set in a school through a poorly written and performed rap.

The score credits two lyricists and seven composers which explains the complete lack of uniformity running through any of it. The 24-song soundtrack contained an astonishingly large variety of different styles and sounds, feeling somewhat like incompatible pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been forced together. Both the direction and performances were clumsy and disjointed, with frequent instances of forgotten lines and actors often seeming unsure of what they were doing.

I wanted to see that this show had the intention to portray the cliched idea of a group of young people who were seen as ‘different’ or ‘misfits’ as children eventually banding together to ‘find their tribe’; a concept that we were treated to more than one stilted monologue about. What I witnessed instead was multiple offensive portrayals of young people with various disabilities, including dwarfism, autism, ADHD and sensory sensitivities and many musical numbers making fun of them and people with these conditions. 

There was use of discriminatory language that has no excuse to be surfacing in 2024 and, for which the characters face zero consequences, and a glaringly obvious circus theme throughout the set and props, coupled with the choice to have the narrator dressed as a ringmaster which intensified my discomfort tenfold. The appearance of a number mocking a character’s gender ambiguity had seemingly no relevance or connection to that character’s actual storyline revolving around being bullied for being named ‘No-Name’, other than a less than subtle attempt at non-binary erasure through the repeated use of phrases such as ‘are you a boy or a girl’ followed by a muddle of pronouns and, at one point, a nastily mocking ‘shim’. The content warnings displayed are harmfully incorrect and miss out many key topics necessary to share including transphobia and ableism, as well as stating that some issues are ‘alluded to’ when they are in fact actively depicted on stage.

Even moving past the layers of disgusting ableism, transphobia, and antisemitism (just to name a few), the fact that anyone believed that this show was of the calibre of a professional production causes me to lose a little faith in humanity. The fact that something like this can be created and produced in this day and age absolutely astounds me and I feel a large sense of disappointment in any venues and companies that are supporting this production and letting it through their doors.

Review by Rachel