When Jimbo first meets Declan at his Nan’s birthday party, the sausage rolls go flying. Declan wants to dance with him but Jimbo’s dad would never allow that. After a year of intense friendship, Declan disappears. Was it murder, suicide or kidnap, asks Jimbo. And how might it be related to the stranger he brings home who bites his bum and drinks his blood?
This monologue, written and performed by Alistair Hall, is scheduled for a run at the Actors Centre’s John Thaw Studio in London later this year. Alexis Gregory’s digital production, with videography by Layke Anderson, is being streamed as a fundraiser for the centre. It is filmed on a stage littered with bin bags, a microwave and a stereo; the absence of an audience increases that sense of desolation.
Wearing checked pyjamas, Hall – who graduated from Rada last year – flickers between despair and defiance as Jimbo, continuously blurring the distinctions between childhood and adulthood. In a characteristic line, Jimbo likens his first ejaculate, as a 12-year-old boy, to strawberry jam. Later, the people in his life will grunt like pigs and bark like dogs. Hall’s pungent script evokes the Wiltshire countryside, deserted canals and the perfume worn by Jimbo’s mother, who has done a “vanishing act”.
It is vividly performed to a static camera, with sparing use of extreme close-ups, and is most successful at evoking a sleep-deprived state of mind: the disorientation, strange silence and gnawing ache particular to a 3am wake-up.
This compelling account of loss and sexual discovery ends rather too abruptly and, at 25 minutes, begs to be expanded. There is a troubling power in its imagery and in several of the elliptical episodes, but their accumulative effect cloaks the story in a mist. Teasing out Declan’s history and giving greater depth to the year he and Jimbo spend together – as well as shading in the characters of the parents – would make us feel the disappearance of both Declan and Jimbo’s mother more deeply and could result in a powerful fringe hour. But as both writer and performer, Hall is clearly a name to remember.
