This one-man reflection on past, present and future pits traditional masculinity against an ever-changing world.
Sound the trumpets! Alert the townsfolk! Finally – us white men have a seat at the theatrical table! *crowd of Stella drinkers goes wild*
Mediocre White Male is an hour-long one-man show written and directed by Will Close and Joe Von Malachowski, as part of the Boys! Boys! Boys! season at the King’s Head after runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and Park Theatre. The title doesn’t lie – we follow a 30-year-old man working as a human statue in a historical theme park, dissatisfied with his deadbeat life and confused by a rapidly-evolving world: ‘change is a thief’, he declares.
Our nameless lead becomes more and more recognisable as the play develops. His comments about female co-workers and joke censorship make him feel like a mix between David Brent and the guy from that one stag-do video that went viral a while back (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PlVm7hALA). He represents all the men left behind by a progressive movement that they don’t quite understand – you could reasonably imagine him in the comment section of an Andrew Tate video saying that women should have their body count stamped on their forehead.
Aided by Craig West’s nifty lighting, he switches between mundane statue work and his thoughts on the evolution of language, gender politics and being deserted; both physically and socially. As a 21-year-old viewer, he does feel very millennial with references to Pogs and The Vicar of Dibley, and some unchallenged comments about ‘oversensitive’ Gen-Zers ‘staring at their phones’ feel less like character development and more like jabs from the writers – clichéd jabs at that.
Close is a strong lead. He clearly has comedy bones, honed by his years of success at the Edinburgh Fringe, but the script doesn’t have quite enough laughs to keep the pace as bouncy as a one-person show must be in the post-Fleabag era. The character has a believable decline, gradually switching out Pringles for Smirnoff, and Close is excellent in the more emotional moments. He displays a masculine vulnerability so rarely seen on stage with aplomb, although he can hang in the sadness which leads the second half of the show to feel a tad one-note.
There is no question that Close’s character, nameless for a reason, represents a huge chunk of the population that are often overlooked by the left-focused theatre world, but Close and Von Malachowski don’t do quite enough to make us empathise with him before his questionable past (no spoilers) is revealed towards the show’s end – it’s a lot easier to see it coming when he makes references to teenage girls’ ‘whale-tails’ early on.
This is an enjoyable and relevant production. Men like these – men that feel laughed at, sneered at and ignored – are everywhere in modern Britain and hold an important place in a festival discussing masculinity in all its forms, but in my opinion the writers don’t make their lead redeemable enough for an audience to reconsider their opinions on these types of men. Still, it’s a good night out. From one mediocre white man to another.