Writer and Director: Stephen Leach
London isn’t for everyone; it can be an angry and lonely place that people try for a while before moving on. For Ryan in Stephen Leach’s new one man play, this is his experience, waiting for his rental contract to expire so he can finally leave a location he comes to hate. The world premiere of Can’t Wait to Leave at Waterloo East Theatre is a multi-layered piece, filled with stories about the city and its dangers, and while there are too many tangents, Ryan’s story paints a realistic picture of the capital city.
Moving to be with his older brother, after four months he discovers his brother is moving to Birmingham with his influencer girlfriend, ready to settle down at 25. Living in a grotty shared flat and surviving as a food delivery driver, Ryan is already desperate to leave and decides to escape from London at the end of the year. When Ryan meets the much older Richard at the pub, they begin a series of occasional encounters that mean more to Richard who doesn’t want Ryan to go.
The success of Jack Holden’s Cruise has paved the way for more of these monologues that explore different facets of the queer lifestyle including this very contemporary exploration of meaningless encounters arranged on dating apps and generational differences within communities that drive behaviours and approaches. It makes Ryan a complex character, a young man who is very sexually experienced but with little knowledge of pleasure or seeking satisfaction for himself, while he speaks with disdain about the men he meets and their lack of sexual prowess.
Leach has created a narrator that it is not clear whether the audience should like. Initially, he is vulnerable, unable to find his place in a city that feels large and overwhelming, filled with people who impose themselves on him, including his brother’s colleagues who speak in declamatory tones and appear at ease with their overt laddishness. London, Ryan explains, is filled with dirt that eventually seeps into everyone and “no matter how hard you scrub you can never get London off of you.” It results in a desperate search for connection even in the seemingly limited ways he finds it.
But Leach’s Ryan is also unpleasant, describing Richard as a “bi-phobic saddo” and treating everyone else with the same kind of contempt, even his mum’s boyfriend, Malcolm, who Ryan suggests is “a bit thick.” He manipulates and plays them for fun, and enjoys raising their expectations, even admitting to having been a homophobic bully himself at school, something he seems to have only limited remorse about. Some of that comes from an unexplored but hinted at self-loathing, a lack of self-understanding but Ryan is also not very nice at times.
Advertised as 60-minutes but running at 90, Leach’s play does get lost in its structure, which like Holden’s uses layers of flashback to create a story, starting in a hospital and eventually telling the audience how Ryan got there. But it is an approach that sometimes uses further flashback layers to return to childhood and other periods of Ryan’s life. Some of that narrative could be compressed to create a tighter piece such as the number of encounters with Richard or the prolonged section about Christmas which conveys very little new information.
Zach Hawkins gives a confident and charismatic performance as Ryan, maintaining eye contact with the audience while keeping them guessing about the nature of his character and conveying the traumatic developments in the story well. Can’t Wait to Leave is a show with plenty of possibility and much to say about the tough London that no one ever really talks about.
Runs until 26 February 2023
