Review: BRAWN by Christopher Wollaton at King’s Head Theatre 16 August to 3 September 2022

‘You won’t see an actor work harder this year, perhaps this decade’ ★★★

You won’t see an actor work harder this year, perhaps this decade, than Christopher Wollaston bringing to life his own body-dysmorphic creature, Ryan, in Brawn at the King’s Head over the next couple of weeks.

Ryan spends every waking moment he can in the garage he’s converted into a personal gym working on perfecting his body. He lives on chicken and broccoli (no carbs!), and he’s given up the alcohol his dad and colleagues on the building site release themselves with of a Friday night.

He’s a ball of energy, forever pacing and twitching when he’s not doing pull-ups, press-ups and pumping weights, and Wollaston’s sweat at the end of 50 minutes is entirely real and entirely admirable in a very fine piece of acting as an unsympathetic man who needs all the sympathy an audience can offer him.

As a message play, it’s entirely effective – Ryan’s obsession is turning him into a rotting hulk, an unhealthy mind in what, with every 20 per cent more he adds to it, will ultimately become an unhealthy body. Male body dysmorphia and its effect on mental health is an under-explored dramatic topic.Dramatically, though, there’s a touch of dollar-book Freud in the plotting (the girl Ryan fancied at school went out with the hunk instead). And Ryan’s focus entirely on himself makes it a one-man show in two senses of the phrase.

It’s entirely realistic that a self-obsessive like Ryan would barely notice the other people in his life, but an audience needs a bit more sense of who the bit players he describes are, what life happens outside the garage. 

His dad’s a builder who likes a drink, his girlfriend’s blonde and has blue eyes, his nemesis is ripped. We get most sense of the girl he loved in his school days and who, in his words, looks guilty when she sees him now (though the distinct possibility that she looks alarmed or scared clearly hasn’t occurred to him).

There’s no sense that any of them has a real existence beyond the needs of the plot. While Ryan’s monomania might make that entirely likely for such a character, the play would be deeper if it pulled off the trick of having him tell us things he does not understand but that we do about how others see him. Actor Wollaston deserves a little more from writer Wollaston.

That said, the performance is so strong, the message so important that the play, sweaty and discomfiting as it is, is well worth the visit.

BRAWN by Christopher Wollaton

King’s Head, Islington    16 August to 3 September

Box Office: https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/brawn

Written and performed by Christopher Wollaton

Directed by Elliot Taylor

Lighting Design by Craig West

Stage Managed by Thomas Fielding

Produced by Zoe Weldon

Reviewer:

David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, Joy Goun award, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.