This week I was tasked with reading Chris Goode’s Men in the Cities (2014), a solo performance shown at this summers’ Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This play surrounds two deaths over the last 12 months, one the suicide of an unnamed man, and the murder of drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich 2013. Goode’s performance, as the title suggests, is a commentary on masculinity. The performance “offers a wide-ranging and depressing portrait of male lives in crisis, repressed emotions, damaged sons, untouched fathers, fantasy power trips and lost souls” (Gardner, 2014). All female interaction or mention is absent from the play, apart from the shrieking of a vixen heard in the street one night described by the first of Goode’s characters. Although Goode calls upon a plethora of characters (all of whom are linked in someway by their interest in a male porn website), we hear more frequently the stories of a retiring widower and a ten year-old sexually curious boy.

The journey’s these characters travel, accompanied by contemporary contextual references, provide a bleak yet provocative commentary on the way in which we accept reality today. This notion Goode talismans with the reoccurring use of David Cameron’s quote “life should mean life”. Since Goode writes himself into the text, allying himself with these characters, he consciously pits the personal against Cameron’s political decisions. Goode perhaps moves one step further from mere commentary on contemporary masculinity as “the play comes from a far darker place, one where men turn their rage not just on each other or on women, but also on themselves. It hints at a potential terrorist inside every man” (Gardner, 2014). This notion of the terrorist within sets the stakes that Goode is trying to establish with this production, a dark and harrowing suggestion of what lies beneath all men.

Works Cited

Gardner, Lyn (2014) ‘Men in the Cities – fierce portrait of violence’ The Guardian [Online] <Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/01/edinburgh-festival-2014-review-men-in-the-cities-lee-rigby> Accessed [03/11/2104]