‘It’s not my job to fix you,” Beth tells her boyfriend, Tobes, as she dumps him for being boring, after they’ve spent two years together. Pretty soon, Tobes is having to fix more than his broken heart and his dreary hand-to-mouth existence (always behind with the rent, always borrowing from his mum). That’s because he has a lump on his testicle – a lump he’s been ignoring for the last two years, just as he’s been ignoring everything else that is wrong in his life, including the fact that he doesn’t like his job.
Can Tobes man up and sort himself out? It doesn’t look likely – when he does finally get to the doctor’s, he finds himself acutely unsettled by the young female GP. There’s plenty of comedy in Luke Norris’s play, commissioned by Paines Plough, in which the self-absorbed Tobes discovers that there are bigger tragedies than his. There are also times when it sounds suspiciously like a health advert aimed at young men reluctant to check themselves for testicular cancer, but as the title suggests, it’s really about an immature young man confronting the fact that it’s time to grow up.
Growth has a beady wit and lots of snazzy one-liners, and is neatly performed by the cast of three. If it doesn’t quite deliver on its early promise, that’s because Norris never finds a way to make the play motor when it’s reliant on such a passive central character. It’s a pity because there’s plenty here that’s funny and truthful, although you can’t help feeling that Beth was right to give wimpy Tobes the elbow.
- At Roundabout at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000
