Wattpad meets Fleabag, except the fourth wall talks back, and he’s got a record deal
There is a particular strain of teenage devotion that never quite leaves the system: the boyband crush that calibrates every romantic disappointment that follows. Party at Jackson Wang’s understands this with real precision, and builds a play around the moment that devotion curdles into something closer to a coping mechanism.
Written and directed by Poppy Brian-Boys, the play follows Quinn (Hattie Conway), a young woman whose adult life is organised, almost imperceptibly to her, around a boyband member named Mason Prescott (Mark Bojan). Beneath the house parties, the dead-end job and the friendships she is too distracted to tend properly, sits a grief she has never let herself feel. The play asks what it means to love someone, and what happens when that love stops being a feeling and starts being a place to hide.
The production has movement threaded through its DNA, courtesy of choreographers Poppy Conway and Karina Au. The ensemble draws on professionally trained actors and dancers, and that pedigree is put to real use. We open on Quinn and her older sister as teenagers at a sleepover, fantasising about boyband members with the specific, hierarchical devotion only young girls manage – who likes which member, who called it first. Quinn’s crush on Mason Prescott is inherited, copied wholesale from her sister the way younger siblings copy everything. Mentions of which one likes carrots are tucked in early on, the kind of reference that lands only for the audience already fluent in it. Even the title turns out to be a piece of fan-fiction shorthand – iykyk, and the play doesn’t slow down to explain itself for anyone who doesn’t, which feels right.
When the sister dies of an overdose at a party, the play’s real subject announces itself. Quinn carries her twenties inside a maladaptive daydream, recasting herself as a star – confident, sexy, adored – and dating Mason Prescott himself. The fantasy plays out in full, glossy commitment before the play lets us see underneath it, at which point we learn Quinn is in fact a hospitality worker, and not a happy one.
The dance sequences are where the production is strongest, and the cast’s technical range is put through its paces – Quinn as star, Quinn and her friends at the club. They are enjoyable and they do real dramaturgical work, carrying the fantasy’s momentum in a way dialogue alone couldn’t sustain. Other fantasy beats, such as the boyband in full lip sync performance, run a little long, though there’s an argument that the indulgence is the point as we are meant to feel how tempting it is to stay inside the dream.
The trouble arrives once the play turns back to reality. At twenty-four, Quinn is meant to reclaim her own story from Mason, becoming the protagonist of her own life rather than a supporting character in his. The second half spells out what the first half dramatised, insecurities stated outright, grief named and processed in scene after explanatory scene, the job search rendered in familiar beats. Given a cast that is stacked with actors and dancers capable of showing rather than telling, the shift to exposition feels like a missed opportunity and the back half loses its sense of an ending, running well past the point where the audience has understood the lesson.
The cast make the most of what they’re given. Bojan has real range, charm and comic commitment layered under a role that could easily have stayed one-note – the man can cry on cue and move his pecs on command, which is its own kind of technical achievement, and he sells the fantasy’s appeal even as the play starts to interrogate it. Michaela Marrable, playing Quinn’s sister as well as doubling into other roles as the ensemble shifts between realities, is a particular pleasure to watch, sharp comic timing paired with real dance skill. Stan Oates, as Ben, is similarly versatile across the ensemble’s shifting roles, finding the comedy in the smaller parts without ever tipping into filler. The soundtrack leans on boybands a British audience will recognise instantly, One Direction among them, alongside a run of Fred Again for the club scenes, which keeps things legible in a way a more Jackson Wang-specific needle drop might not have.
At ninety minutes the play overstays a script that has more discipline in its first half than its second. But the idea underneath it, that grief can hide inside a crush, that devotion can curdle into avoidance, is a strong one, and a talented cast go a long way towards carrying it through the stretches where the writing loses its nerve.
Party at Jackson Wang’s last show at Bread and Roses Theatre, London on Sunday 12th July is now sold out.