A promising new piece of musical theatre

The black box studio at the Burton Taylor Theatre was an intimate and atmospheric backdrop to this brand-new musical, making its debut at the Oxford’s Offbeat Festival. Soundtracked by a fantastic live band (Georgia Ayew on drums, Jennie Beard on bass and writer-composer Bart Thiede on keys), the show follows the relationship between Séan from Ireland (Liam McGrath) and Stan from Poland (Cam Gray), as they navigate their way through the complexities of EU migration, religious upbringing and LGBTQI+ identities. 

The pub setting, pints of Guinness and tongue-in-cheek dialogue gave the opening sequence a feel of Jim Cartwright’s touching play Two – a snapshot of an everyday boozer that will inevitably become the site of more hard-hitting conversations. The music was engaging and showed a nice range of satirical tunes about the anxieties and excitements of modern dating, to tender ballads that explored matters of the self and sexuality. The lyrics were on the whole catchy, if at times a little repetitive; I think there’s enormous potential to add more context and depth there. The presence of Irish folk was lovely, but given Have You Met Stan?’s focus on national identities, a future production might also feature traditional Polish music to underline Stan’s storyline – just as the Gaelic libretto does for Séan. 

Musical director Bart Thiede has boldly woven his own upbringing into the piece, being of Polish heritage and growing up in Northern Ireland. The narrative saw Stan address the xenophobic moral panic claims of Polish people ‘taking our jobs’, as well as the lingering Catholic guilt that casts a shadow over his homosexuality. I think the production can take these ideas much further; it would have been fascinating to learn more about the social, political and religious parallels between the two countries, and how these matters are mirrored in Stan and Séan’s relationship. Perhaps a lightheartedly scathing musical number could do the trick – though I’m certainly no composer.  

The ending had solemnity, starkly reminder us that we might know, or ourselves be, ‘Stan’ – a figure that represents the bravery of coming out and potential tragic consequences. Overall, the storyline could have been made a bit clearer: we really wanted to know why the protagonists fell in love with each other at the beginning, and some more focused staging would leave instrumental interludes feeling more confident. But I look forward to seeing where the ensemble takes this story: it has real importance to current conversations around sexuality, migration and suicide.