An engrossing hour and a half of Friends-esque apartment comedy in which two men learn to love by leaning on each other’s dodgy dating advice.
Stories about cis heterosexual mens’ perspectives on romantic and sexual relationships are very important in our ever unfolding cultural conversation. As we pick apart the toxic bits of the patriarchy, it makes sense that theatre continues to explore issues that these men – at the top of the food chain – face daily. But when these stories fail to portray female characters who feel real, they do themselves and the relevant issues they seek to address a disservice.
*spoilers ahead*
Thanks For Having Me, playing at the King’s Head Theatre, follows two young men who lean on each other’s own brands of dating advice. Before they know it, they’ve swapped positions, with neither man ending up with the type of relationship for which he thought he was destined.
Honey (Fergus Foster) and Maya (Elizabeth Green) are on a date and have found themselves conveniently in Honey’s flat. Just when things are heating up, Honey receives a call from Cashel (Keelan Kember – also the playwright), an anxious romantic, hypochondriac, and friend. Cashel, freshly dumped by his girlfriend of eight years, asks if he can come over. Between mile-a-minute thoughts on the nature of love and his tortured new existence as a single man, Cashel finds comfort when Maya offers to set him up with a friend of hers. She warns that this friend, Eloise (Charlotte Hayes Jones), is not your run-of-the-mill sweetheart, but Cashel agrees to meet her anyway. Maya calls Eloise right then and there, and their double-date is set for later that week.
At the double date, Cashel and Eloise hit it off, and both couples have what is later reported to be a great night of sex in their respective bedrooms (Cashel has conveniently moved in with Honey). The next morning, Cashel tries to kiss Eloise before she leaves, to which she responds by drawing a clear boundary: she doesn’t want a relationship, she just wants sex. No kisses goodbye and no breakfast afterwards. Cashel agrees, Eloise leaves, and Honey enters to learn that Cashel has suddenly, haplessly fallen in love with Eloise, despite what she’s just told him. Honey advises him to text her after 10PM and invite her over. Eloise returns and quickly realizes that Cashel clearly didn’t get the message the first time around. In his intelligent, uninterruptible, know-it-all tune, Cashel bluntly diagnoses Eloise as playing cold and hard-to-get. Eloise responds with her version of America Ferrera’s speech in Barbie, explaining all of the double standards she has to navigate as a hot woman who just wants to have sex, no strings attached. They have sex anyway.
Meanwhile, Honey – who, until this point, has been Cashel’s hype man and a proponent of no-strings-attached relationships with women – realizes he’s fallen in love with Maya and asks her if they can be exclusive. Maya, like her other female counterpart in the play, draws a clear boundary: this is not what she thought this relationship was, nor is it something she can definitively say she wants. Honey stops her from leaving and convinces her that she feels something special about him. They become exclusive.
In both of these storylines, the men try to convince the women to more honestly reconsider their feelings for them, even after the women have drawn clear boundaries. Besides the troubling omission of a singular scene in which the two women talk to each other alone, what ultimately clouds the motivations of (and thus, the audience’s empathy for) these two men is the sense that they have conquered the challenges these women pose to them and enjoy telling us how they’ve done so, instead of showing us what they’ve learned from these women and how they’ve allowed these relationships to affect them emotionally.
The play primarily centers around the character of Cashel, who occasionally delivers an impassioned soliloquy. Kember’s incredible pacing, both as a comedic actor and as a writer, lends the scenes a stunning, admirable, and engrossing energy. Very rarely was the audience’s attention dropped. However, Cashel’s arc from nervous romantic to grounded, advice-spewing expert on long-term relationships feels abrupt, especially as he barely reflects on his freshly uprooted relationship of eight years. The hurt, hyper-anxious young man we meet at the beginning is endearing in his over-the-top catastrophizing. It’s clear that the point of this cringey comedy is for the play to seem more self-aware of Cashel’s self-centeredness and unreasonable frustration with women. But it’s jarring when he suddenly seems ready to give the sexy Eloise a lesson on the mask she wears when he is never challenged to do the same with the anxious-comic mask he wears.
In terms of staging, the use of space by director Monica Cox was often awkward. As the lights dimmed at each scene, actors could be seen running swiftly in the blue light to their next entrance (sometimes having to cross the whole stage). This could have been remedied by using backstage crosses or perhaps less costume changes – both of which did provide a clear sense of time passing within the play but at the cost of tediously long transitions. There were also a few moments that felt repetitively crowded in the same spots, and one scene in which, after someone suggests they play a drinking game, they all crowd onto the couch, awkwardly facing the same direction, when there is a whole empty stage with which to play.
Thanks For Having Me is promising in its exploration of how cis heterosexual white men initiate, nurture, end, and bounce back from relationships with women. It’s a story that probably many people would love to know more about, and one that doesn’t necessarily need its women to have huge leading roles and complex storylines to be effective. But if the story lacks believably authentic female characters who are allowed to affect believable emotional change in these men, it begs the question of what new perspective this production is trying to put forth.