REVIEW: MEDIOCRE WHITE MALE at King’s Head Theatre 12-18 March 2023

‘This is a confident, clever production, which neatly handles a thorny subject matter’ ★★★★★ 

From the opening moments it’s clear that ‘Mediocre White Male’ thrives off audience misconceptions. At the sound of actor Will Close’s footsteps, the audience automatically quietens in anticipation, only to begin giggling nervously when the actor, his back to the audience, takes a swig of water and looks through his phone for several seconds. Finally, after what seems like minutes, but can only be moments, the lights dim.

The sense that time contracts and elongates at will is prominent throughout the play. The unnamed narrator, the Mediocre White Male of the title, proceeds to introduce us to a workplace unmoored in time, where the castle manager can require the long-standing lord of the manor to attend gender inclusivity training as a result of his use of language towards the kitchen wenches.

Will Close, striking in a ruff and doublet, appears to depict a statue come to life, black face paint crisp on a powdered white face. As the story proceeds, and more and more compromising details are revealed, he anxiously passes his hand across his face so that the makeup smudges and mixes, eventually turning grey. Even the pedestal on which he stands opens to reveal an interior like that of the locker of a teenage boy.

Of course, we are not really in a working castle; there was no HR department in the 17^th century. Our narrator is only playing Sir Something-Or-Other, in a rather cheesy interactive museum. When prompted, he delivers his lines to museum guests in character, word-perfect, but stale, the oft-repeated inflections overtired, the rhythm of the worlds beaten out of recognition with overuse. There is the sense that the historical value has been slowly washed out of this exhibit. The wenches from earlier (he takes care to remind us that ‘wench’ is their job title, he’s not choosing to call them wenches) are 21^st century teenagers, who band together in the face of this older man’s over-familiar language. Still, we are somehow dislocated from reality. The Mediocre White Male, or MWM, as his colleagues call him, is disturbed by the purported generational gap. Wasn’t he part of their generation, only a moment ago?

Close is disquietingly convincing as the MWM. At first, his performance is warming and reassuring: he appears to have all the eloquence of an actor combined with the ease of a confident teenage boy, who hasn’t yet noticed that he has outgrown his prime. Beneath this, however, we catch glimpses of a guarded, and insidious, self-conscious anger which he struggles to fully conceal. The character’s self-assurance is precisely his downfall – so sure is he of his place in the world, he finds he cannot register when the world around him changes. ‘Change is a thief,’ he tells us. The real triumph of his piece is its ability to coax the audience into feeling for this man – and he is a grown man – who seems to have been shut out of every piece of kindness he once knew.



This is a confident, clever production, which neatly handles a thorny subject matter and, perhaps wisely, knows where to toe the line. The image of the statue itself immediately brings to mind that of Edward Colston, a Bristol-born merchant and slave trader that was pulled down by protestors in 2020. The play obliquely refers to the more unsavoury parts of the exhibition’s history: there’s a reference to torture and the ‘way he [the lord] made his money’ but stays its hand from dealing with this head on. This is probably a good thing, as I can’t imagine the MWM having anything intelligent to say on the matter. Nevertheless, the play makes an articulate point that its main character wouldn’t be capable of delivering. It’s a distasteful, but salient question: is there any redemption possible for men who mistreat women? And should there be?

Mediocre White Male by Will Close and Joe Von Malachowski

King’s Head Theatre, 12-18 March

Box Office Mediocre White Male | What's On | King's Head Theatre (kingsheadtheatre.com)

Performer:   Will Close

Sound Designer:     Dominic Brennan

Costume & Set Designer: Holly Pigott

Producers:   Oli Seymour for Metal Rabbit Productions & Susannah Bance

Reviewed by Natalie Mackinnon

Natalie is a writer and playwright from Edinburgh. She is a graduate of the Lir Academy for Dramatic Arts in Dublin and the Traverse Young Writers group in Edinburgh. Her writing has been performed on stage in the UK and Ireland and has been adapted for radio by the BBC.