Three men are gathered in an online forum to speak of women as bitches and “Beckys”. These are “incels”, who boast a coded vocabulary of hate and valorise male celibacy. That is, until a fourth man among them has sex. The opening scene is the morning after and the woman he spent the night with stands hovering behind his laptop.
Cuckboy (Fiachra Corkery) and fellow incels Ghost (GoblinsGoblinsGoblins) Crusher (Jackson Ryan) and Einstain (Jimmy Kavanagh) are volubly and virulently anti-women. “Feminists have destroyed male and female courtship,” says one. But gradually they are shown to be desperate for intimacy, once the itch has been scratched by Cuckboy’s hookup with Margaret (Justine Stafford).
First staged at the Edinburgh fringe last summer, this show about incel ideology, and what leads men to attack the opposite sex with such fulminating misogyny, has only grown in relevance. A black comedy by Dublin-based writer Jamie Sykes, who directs too, it takes the high-stakes decision to eke laughter from a culture based on hate and sometimes murderous terror. And on the whole it succeeds.
Visually it has a ludicrous set up, the actors carrying cardboard frames in lieu of laptop scenes, which, when they glitch or are turned off, show characters comically frozen on the screen. The script sometimes elicits sympathy for these men, some of whom were terribly bullied boys once; all of whom are evidently lonely, inadequate outsiders. Their contempt for women turns your stomach but their loathing is turned inwards too, with graphic self-hatred, depression, and an almost fetished attitude towards suicide – although the drama does not go further into that darkness.
It is at its best when it captures the men’s twisted sexual hunger. “Women,” they chant, and you feel their resentful yearning.
The actors give thoroughly fabulous performances, and the show includes breakouts of music and movement that archly reflect the men’s sexual frustration in dance, then turn into expressions of inner turmoil with wavy-armed Kate Bush-style emoting. These interludes are very amusing, but perhaps repeated too often to lessened effect.
Margaret is too conveniently a journalist who wants to find out what makes these men tick. Also too conveniently, she makes all the intellectual counter-challenging arguments against inceldom, throwing the Magdalene laundries and Irish laws around contraception into the mix, as well as bringing in the story of her brother, too briefly. The men threaten to dox her and it is a potentially terrifying moment – especially in light of the misogynistic online threats that women all too often receive – but the danger here is too quickly neutered.
The ending does not have the punch it might, yet this play is gripping, queasily entertaining, and shows clear signs of arresting originality. Skyes is definitely one to watch.
• At the Pleasance theatre, London, until 31 May
