The Guys

As always, I received a warm welcome at Bonkers Playhouse, this bijou theatre produces multiple shows every year under the owner Mark Walker.

Live theatre can be unpredictable and for the Bonkers team this was the case tonight, just before the house opened the screen in the set decided to die, this was set up to be the window in the building
and show the passage of time over the day in question. The team worked to get this running again which it refused to do so they set up a small monitor on the side of the stage so that the audience
could still see the images that accompanied the show.

The Guys is a play about a writer who helps a fire chief write the eulogies for the members of his team that he lost on September 11th in the Twin Towers tragedy. The play opens with sounds from that tragic day including the explosions and the emergency services, we then meet Joan played by Kaye Stevens introducing her life as a New Yorker and the events of September 11 th and how that affected her, Kaye brought emotion to this part and sometimes an anger that I feel the writer was trying to convey. David Russell played Nick the fire chief who had lost many of his team in the tower’s, sustained grief is not an easy emotion to play and David did this very well, to the audience it felt as though the people they were talking about he had known well and was mourning their loss with every folder opened. I have commend them both for the accents, they did not falter during the show.

The lighting changes worked general lighting for when they were talking and coloured spots for when we could see what Joan was thinking as head as she tried to help Nick write a personal and
heartfelt eulogy for each of the fallen men. Whilst I enjoyed the play on a personal note, I found some of the script very Americanised, there is a part where Joan tells the audience that this happened to New Yorkers not the rest of the world and that it is their pain, as someone who watched the events of that day unfold with a colleague who lost their brother-in-law, I can assure the writer that the effects of what happened could be felt all over the world.

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