Writer-director Stacey Cullen and actor-producer Sam Bates discuss Overwhelm, a raw exploration of male loneliness, vulnerability, and the quiet crises shaping modern masculinity.
This show runs from 18-19th October at The Bread and Roses Theatre – Tickets here.
Overwhelm explores male loneliness and radicalisation from a female writer’s perspective. What drew you to this subject, and how did you approach writing authentically about experiences outside your own lived reality?
SC — There was a time, about two years ago I think, where the male loneliness epidemic became a more prevalent topic that people were discussing openly online. The popularity of the subject gave rise to a lot of social media backlash, mostly from women. Women would see a video, a tweet, a reddit post where a man was saying something misogynistic, or just plain offensive, and they’d repost it with the caption, “men should be lonelier actually”.
It never sat right with me. The internet, for all its great purposes, has always been a safe haven for those with extreme views. It provides vital community for some, but it also fosters these festering pockets of hatefulness. Not only that, it platforms and promotes those pockets, because it generates views, which in turn generate revenue. And societally, we have bought into it, hook, line, and sinker. It causes so much discord and chaos, by design, and it robs us of our ability to recognise one another as human.
That was really the catalyst for the idea behind ‘Overwhelm’. The decision to write it specifically as a small group of young men from the West Midlands was an added layer of challenge for me. As a woman from the US, I wasn’t just writing outside my own gendered experiences, but outside my cultural ones as well.
You’ve said it’s “so easy to treat young men with disdain.” What moments during the writing or rehearsal process most shifted your understanding of masculinity and vulnerability?
SC — The research period both before and during writing is one that I take really seriously. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent watching documentaries, reading studies, reading books, reading manifestos… yes, manifestos. And I’m fully aware of how this is going to sound, but please bear with me here — the manifestos were probably the most eye-opening, heart-wrenching bit of research. They were horrific, but they were revealing as well. The more I read them, the more I was able to begin reading between the lines. I could see the pain under the surface of the ire, the rage. I could see the little boys who were never taught that it was okay to cry, to express themselves, to ask for help. Picturing those little boys, just how lost they were, absolutely broke my heart.
I was raised in a very religious household, where my stepfather was held up as the head of the house, not to be questioned, always to be respected. He was — and remains to this day — a cruel, damaged man, who used traditional “values” to exert power over people because of his insecurities as a man. Not only that, he was supported by the patriarchal structures of the church, and enabled to get away with various abuses because of that support. Believe me, I was set up in every way possible to lack all sympathy for men.
The thing that I think is important to recognise is that these structures are so ingrained in our societal makeup that it’s difficult, almost impossible, for any one of us to escape them entirely. We all harbour some bit of misogyny, often internalised, because it’s hardwired. No one gets out clean. Jake, Miles, and Riley all reflect levels of it, because it’s true to life — Sam, Louis, and Max (the actors who play them, respectively) all lean into that fact with such grace. In the rehearsal room, we’ve been able to have such open, honest, enlightening conversations about masculinity and what it really means when you strip away all the nonsense. Being part of that, watching them grapple with their own ideas about patriarchy and modern masculinity, has been such a privilege.
Over the summer, we went out one evening to an arcade bar. We met up with some other friends, who had invited some of their friends. Max, who plays Riley in the show, noticed that one of the friends-of-a-friend had introduced themselves to him, but completely ignored me, even though I was standing right next to Max, playing a game with him. He pointed this out to me later, saying it had bothered him because it felt dismissive of me as a person — I hadn’t even noticed. It’s become one of my favourite anecdotes from this time we’ve all spent together. It’s all about awareness, the little things, and just trying to understand each other more.
As both performer and co-artistic director, how do you balance being inside the story as Jake while also helping shape the production’s wider vision?
SB — I probably operate more so as an actor than having a greater artistic view of this piece in particular. I am an actor by trade who started a theatre company because the industry is oversaturated and I’m too impatient to wait my turn! It’s been a privilege to be able to bring Jake’s character off the page.
We try to operate something akin to forum theatre where all views and ideas are welcomed, but not always utilized. The concept of an idea sparks an idea, which sparks an idea. We want to incubate a culture where people feel that they can offer ideas and try new things, instead of having a director micromanage and take away the artist’s voice. Every round of this show has been different, mining and refining the work to get as pure an image as we can, and that has only come around through the fact we value our team’s thoughts and ideas.
But I also have the pleasure to be able to do this as Stacey’s vision has been clear and strong from day one. It’s a company’s dream to employ someone who has so definitively created the world and characters with a clear arc, message and artistic concepts, while also drawing from their actors.
The play demands emotional transparency while depicting themes of silence and repression. How do you prepare yourself mentally and physically to perform something that hits so close to real-world struggles?
SB — If I’m honest, it’s a decent warm up, physical and vocal, while focusing the mental onto the task at hand. I also tend to use music and playlists for characters to further shift my mental space into the grounds that I need to play in. I think, especially when tackling potentially heavy subject matters, you have to enjoy the conversations that you’re having and the emotions that you are portraying.
I think that growing up I was raised to be quite hard and stoic. Stiff upper lip, don’t let them know you’re hurt (even after breaking my arm on a football pitch) and to hit back should anyone do so to me. Exploring these emotions is something I could never really do as a young man so having someone compliment you, especially a man, for expressing grief, fear, sadness, or loneliness on stage is something magic. It is important to shelve those feelings too, not taking the character with you into the real world. Walking offstage with tears in your eyes but smiling at the bar with a pint in your hand and talking with folk is kind of the best to go really. For me anyway!
Overwhelm gives space to the kind of conversations men rarely have publicly. What reactions do you hope to spark in male audience members—and perhaps just as importantly, in women watching?
SB — I think it truly depends on the audience we get in. Our target audience for this is not theatre goers. A lot of the people that this show is talking about and exploring are also people who wouldn’t go to theatre because its not very “masculine”. But mostly, I want people to talk to their boys. Friends, brothers, sons, nephews. And to think about what and how we say things to boys and men that further entrench these feelings of hopelessness and isolation. And how these patriarchal ideas are the very things that make the world a dangerous place for women but also for these young men themselves.
This issue is complex, there is no one answer fits all or even 50% of cases but hopefully this piece of theatre shows the many factors and complexity of this issue at hand.
SC — Oh, both are equally important for me, for sure. While the play may be about young men, its underlying message is definitely universal. For the men in the audience, I hope it inspires them to check in on their friends — not just the surface level, “you alright?”, but taking a real inventory of how they’re doing. Let them know that it’s okay if they’re struggling. Offer an ear, a shoulder. Tell them that you love them without having to make a joke about it. Allow yourself to be vulnerable and open with your mates.
For women, I’d like them to walk away from it with a little more understanding for the young men who get isolated, pushed to the fringes — the ones we’re so prone to writing off because they seem “weird” or “creepy”. I hope they feel inclined to consider nuance and individual circumstance before they judge a person. And I hope we can start to let go of this idea that men are a monolith, wholly deserving of disdain.
We are all a summary of everything that has happened to and around us. And yes, we have individual responsibility to contend with those things, in a constructive way that helps us to grow. But some of us are given many more tools than others — and we would do well to remember that more often.
The title Overwhelm suggests both a feeling and a state of crisis. When you think about the world the play inhabits, what does “overwhelm” mean to each of you personally?
SB — Overwhelm is what the current state of the world feels like, from Flint still not having clean water, to the persecution of the Uighur muslims in China, the unsettling rise of fascism in Western Civilization, to the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people — and our own government’s complicity in it. It can often feel like there are just too many fires to put out, the fires just raging. But on the ground level, for everyday people, sometimes the best thing we can do is engage in conversation, and we are trying to start one here.
SC — For me, “overwhelm” encompasses everything that these people are going through. In theatre, we talk about the “kitchen sink drama” — gritty, true-to-life stories of the working-class — and whether it’s justified or not, that label has always felt a little off to me. Dismissive, or reductionist maybe. We often hear critics say that a play is trying to do “too many things”, but I guess that’s kind of the crux of it, for me. There’s too much going on, too much to be dealt with, to focus in on any one particular thing. All major issues, at their core, are actually a convergence of a subset of other issues, which create the conditions for the “main” issue — and we can’t discuss the main problem, without discussing the problems that came before, that contributed. It’s all inextricably intertwined.
I suppose, at the end of the day, I want to ask audiences and critics alike — how can we possibly be expected to keep up with it all? And by that same token… how can we not