The Edinburgh Fringe is the place for new writers to flex their muscles, but Matt Harris's play about a rent boy taking his revenge on a sado-masochistic client by making him listen to the story of his childhood abuse, is a pretty flabby affair. And that's even with all the endless chatter about mighty oaks.
Essentially this is Jack the Giant killer as a gay fairy tale for our times. Only there is no happy every after for our Jack the Lad, who is sent off by his old mum to bring home the bacon and ends up being the one who gets frazzled to a crisp. The idea of using the fairy tale motif is a good one, but Harris complicates and muddles the archetypal story and by introducing a succession of Jack's abusive clients into the stew throws the net too wide. Particularly when they are not so much characters as walking, talking clichés.
There is plenty of hard work from Alister Barton as Jack and from Preece Killick as an assortment of mixed up low lifes, but this is not so much shocking as tired and rather silly.
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