Performed by Chalk Line Theatre at the Hope Theatre, May 16th 2019
“I am a man. A failed man.” says Nicholas Shalebridge’s Max as Testament begins. He emerges a solitary, pitifully isolated figure out of total darkness onto a minimal set draped in foreboding light and sound. It is a small, intimate space transformed by Becca White’s superlative set design and Alan Walden’s sound into a ward, with a hospital’s sterility and stillness, broken only by a languid, sedated light, made cold, harsh, distant, and yet longing to be warm and full.
Fitting that this tableau prepares us, in its way, for writer-director Sam Edmund’s Testament, performed in support of the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), a charity doing outstanding work for the cause of male mental health and suicide prevention. His is a story of cruelly subdued light, purloined warmth, and the terrible human cost of the failure to allow light to shine.
Shalebridge’s Max, confined to a psychiatric ward under care after having tried to commit suicide following the terrible car accident which killed his beloved girlfriend Tess (Jessica Frances), and in paroxysms of repressed guilt and shame, descends into the depths of serious mental illness whilst his dedicated doctor (Shireenah Ingram) tries everything she can to help bring him back from the brink. As the traumatised Max begins to seek answers in conversations with Jesus (David Angland) and finds himself beset by harrowing visitations from Lucifer (Daniel Leadbitter), his only salvation from personal hell – and hope of living through traumatic brain injury -lies with his brother Chris (William Shackleton).
Through playwright Edmund’s incisive, ingenious lens of traumatic – indeed, life-threatening - brain injury as metaphor for the chronic, deadly horrors wrought by toxic masculinity, there follows an hour of tightly paced, skilfully directed and wonderfully acted human drama on the perils of performing manhood, and with it, the very real, myriad emotional and psychological harms of denying vulnerability, demanding a crassly misogynistic, tough-guy laddish-ness of all young boys and men, and ultimately, the cruel, unjust failure to allow ourselves and each other to be fully, authentically human.
Left: Nicholas Shalebridge as Max. Credit: Lidia Crisafulli
His wonderfully observant, witty, and incisive writing – itself a highlight of the performance - crackles with a macabre energy and pathos, filled with delightful wordplay and lyrical flourishes in the dour refrains of the oft-repeated great lies, now recast – more accurately - as the mad, angry delusions of a pitiable husk of brutalised humanity in crippling pain: “I am a man.” “I’m fine.”
Through playwright Edmund’s incisive, ingenious lens of traumatic – indeed, life-threatening - brain injury as metaphor for the chronic, deadly horrors wrought by toxic masculinity, there follows an hour of tightly paced, skilfully directed and wonderfully acted human drama on the perils of performing manhood, and with it, the very real, myriad emotional and psychological harms of denying vulnerability, demanding a crassly misogynistic, tough-guy laddish-ness of all young boys and men, and ultimately, the cruel, unjust failure to allow ourselves and each other to be fully, authentically human.
His wonderfully observant, witty, and incisive writing – itself a highlight of the performance - crackles with a macabre energy and pathos, filled with delightful wordplay and lyrical flourishes in the dour refrains of the oft-repeated great lies, now recast – more accurately - as the mad, angry delusions of a pitiable husk of brutalised humanity in crippling pain: “I am a man.” “I’m fine.”
As the plot homes in on Max’s brain damage, so the writing performs surgical incision into the fundamental brokenness of the performatively male mind. The gorgeous penmanship is ably accompanied by William Harrison’s beautiful tapestry of sound, Alan Walden’s erratic, strobing lights driven to madness with straining to shine freely, and Becca White’s gracefully fluid, minimal set, able to transform on a coin-turn into a procession of grim, darkly comical tableaus of that particularly pitiable, pathetic, pretended manhood in focus; recollections of Max with his friends at home all energetically getting ready for a night out on the pull in the club betray the stifling, lunatic misogyny of all laddish ritual; the club itself, a miserable purgatory of incessant noise and light where no-one can ever really be heard, and which physically forces Max and Tess apart on their first meeting – throngs of other men drawing him away from an avatar of femininity itself, and leaving him struggling to meaningfully connect with that energy - evokes and exposes the hellish environs in which, says Max, “Men are crushed by men.”.
Even in the happy memories of his lost relationship interspersed throughout, he is deeply insecure about his manhood, his attempts at genuine affection and declarations of love habitually eliding into grand pronouncements of heroic might and manliness in the mould of Gladiator’s Maximus, under the glare of the spotlight and a watchful audience – feeling, perhaps, as so many men do, that he is endlessly judged by dozens of cold, pitiless male eyes ready to denounce him as not man enough at any moment.
For him, there can be no Maximus Decimus Meridius. There is only Mad Max. All, finally, always leading back to the mental hospital - and to brokenness, desperate delusion, suicidality, and insanity, with Max pulled back and forth like a puppet on strings in visually striking and skilful moments of physical theatre, all by way of Edmund and his fellow guiding hand Harrison’s superb direction and staging.
Such powerful, politically charged and poignant scenes are brought to vivid life by a troupe of skilled and accomplished East 15 alumni. Lead Nicholas Shalebridge is outstanding as Max, with a commanding and compelling stage presence underscored by moving sincerity, vulnerability, and emotional range. As an avatar of male vulnerability in full relief, he gets some wonderful, heart-breaking, sympathetic monologues and great moments of emotional turmoil which make for stirring and thought-provoking viewing.
Such powerful, politically charged and poignant scenes are brought to vivid life by a troupe of skilled and accomplished East 15 alumni. Lead Nicholas Shalebridge is outstanding as Max, with a commanding and compelling stage presence underscored by moving sincerity, vulnerability, and emotional range. As an avatar of male vulnerability in full relief, he gets some wonderful, heart-breaking, sympathetic monologues and great moments of emotional turmoil which make for stirring and thought-provoking viewing.
His stage brother William Shackleton, in the course of his own emotionally impactful and sobering character arc, uses an affecting, contrastingly understated performance to drive at a genuine fraternal love and care, towards the need for all men to really connect with one another in times of crisis, whilst his character’s sincere efforts are undercut by his own unaddressed neuroses and need for outreach, reminding us all of our common blind spot as men; that we are too often busied appearing as a pillar of strength for others to make time to address our own emotional needs, and that this must change, making for wonderful work from Shackleton.
Credit: Lidia Crisafulli
Shireenah Ingram lends a distinctive and valuable stage presence to The Doctor, cutting a sympathetic, distressed figure visibly taxed with Max’s protestations against treatment, even as he languishes quarantined in a mental hospital. It is regrettable that she is one of the only central ethnic minority cast members on stage, although the fact that a woman of colour nevertheless acts, in her way, as the avatar of feminist impulses and as a guide for the broken Max, and indeed Chris, out of the choking mire of toxic masculinity towards emotional openness and an acceptance of the need for help, is strikingly significant by itself, lending her solid performance and the play’s strong writing all the more thematic and meta-textual strength and appreciable impact for her being here.
Meanwhile, David Angland is a revelation as Christ, filled with a boundless, infectious energy and zeal simultaneously contrasted with a sinister undertone of self-centeredness, cynicism and cruelty, preaching ignorance of pain, the virtues of depression pill-popping, and telling Max not to waste the time of the doctors. His is an accomplished, dark reflection of the futility of getting around the fundamental need for men to talk without recourse to religion or medicine, and he is never anything but an involving, contagious joy to watch.
Shireenah Ingram lends a distinctive and valuable stage presence to The Doctor, cutting a sympathetic, distressed figure visibly taxed with Max’s protestations against treatment, even as he languishes quarantined in a mental hospital. It is regrettable that she is one of the only central ethnic minority cast members on stage, although the fact that a woman of colour nevertheless acts, in her way, as the avatar of feminist impulses and as a guide for the broken Max, and indeed Chris, out of the choking mire of toxic masculinity towards emotional openness and an acceptance of the need for help, is strikingly significant by itself, lending her solid performance and the play’s strong writing all the more thematic and meta-textual strength and appreciable impact for her being here.
Meanwhile, David Angland is a revelation as Christ, filled with a boundless, infectious energy and zeal simultaneously contrasted with a sinister undertone of self-centeredness, cynicism and cruelty, preaching ignorance of pain, the virtues of depression pill-popping, and telling Max not to waste the time of the doctors. His is an accomplished, dark reflection of the futility of getting around the fundamental need for men to talk without recourse to religion or medicine, and he is never anything but an involving, contagious joy to watch.
His counterpart, Daniel Leadbitter’s Lucifer is an intriguingly dark messiah on Max’s shoulder, driving him to paranoia, further madness, deeper depression, and desperate bargaining. Both give triumphant turns in their roles, and each lends themselves well to smaller roles as suitably dreadful ‘lad’ stereotypes elsewhere.
Last, but certainly not least of all, Jessica Frances capably performs an endearingly lively Tess, if one somewhat, perhaps fittingly, relegated to the margins; hers is a haunting absent presence, more of a Lost Lenore in the abstract than any fully realised character all her own – but, one gathers, such is life for women in the aggressively homosocial domain of men, forever trying to show off masculine credentials to other lads, and hopelessly struggling to achieve an impossible standard of manliness.
Last, but certainly not least of all, Jessica Frances capably performs an endearingly lively Tess, if one somewhat, perhaps fittingly, relegated to the margins; hers is a haunting absent presence, more of a Lost Lenore in the abstract than any fully realised character all her own – but, one gathers, such is life for women in the aggressively homosocial domain of men, forever trying to show off masculine credentials to other lads, and hopelessly struggling to achieve an impossible standard of manliness.
She exists, poignantly, only as the idea of a girlfriend, as a broken man’s fading, idealised memory, with no full recognition of femininity as fellow humanity from any of the men until it is far too late for all involved. A grim commentary from Edmunds, perhaps, in our age of young men’s online radicalisation, on the human consequences of men’s failure to find alternative emotional outlets and a means of healthy expression of feelings beyond the confines of romantic love and the deleterious idea of some material need to have a girlfriend not only to “be a man”, but to be in safe, pre-approved proximity to the feminine at all. That she is a woman literally killed by men showing off to each other in Max’s precious car – one named after a woman, no less, seemingly stressing notions of woman as a male object in their cloistered, hyper-masculine world - cannot be insignificant. It’s a solid, haunting performance, bolstering an outstanding work further still.
Credit: Lidia Crisafulli
Testament is a beautifully written, staged, and performed work in every aspect, absolutely worth the price of admission and a night out. In itself, such accomplished writing from a man is a bracing appeal to our shared humanity and capacity for soulful creativity. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, in the Victorian era of Muscular Christianity that laid the historical foundations of modern toxic masculinity (witness Max’s significant conversations with the uncharacteristically cynical and dismissive Jesus Christ), that to be a male writer was to be shunned and despised for staying at home, and thus venturing too close to the feminine domestic sphere for other men’s comfort.
Testament is a beautifully written, staged, and performed work in every aspect, absolutely worth the price of admission and a night out. In itself, such accomplished writing from a man is a bracing appeal to our shared humanity and capacity for soulful creativity. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, in the Victorian era of Muscular Christianity that laid the historical foundations of modern toxic masculinity (witness Max’s significant conversations with the uncharacteristically cynical and dismissive Jesus Christ), that to be a male writer was to be shunned and despised for staying at home, and thus venturing too close to the feminine domestic sphere for other men’s comfort.
In this, Sam Edmunds’ work, and the efforts of all his talented cast and crew, is a marvellous, triumphant refutation of male flight from femininity and a passionate cri de Coeur for a broad expansion of what it is to be a man of the world. It is not acceptable to Edmunds that Max is stripped of fundamental humanity, reduced, as women so often are, to a product, to “A dad’s son, a boy who was raised to be a man.” Instead, he demands an acceptance of the vulnerability of men, an allowance for their failures, and licence to simply be people.
Perhaps Max, in the play’s first gripping moments, puts it best:
“I am a man. A failed man. A hu-man.”
Perhaps Max, in the play’s first gripping moments, puts it best:
“I am a man. A failed man. A hu-man.”
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