Writer: Ollie Maddigan
Director: Scott Le Crass
Olive Boy – so nicknamed by his mother when he was born with slightly green skin – is a cocky 15-year-old who, after an unexpected change of schools, is eager to fit in with the coolest guy, avoid the geekiest cliques and get off with the girl he can’t stop staring at across the science lab.
Ollie Maddigan, writing and performing his own autobiographical work, perfectly captures that all too familiar sense of teenage bravado, the notion of being unstoppable because pausing to contemplate anything else would be too much to bear.
Maddigan’s onstage version of himself uses tasteless humour, obsesses endlessly about sex and objectifies everybody he meets. It comes as no surprise that he is harbouring some deep secrets, all tied up with the death of his mother and his forced relocation to live with the father he has only seen a few times.
Maddigan offers us glimpses of the agony his protagonist endures. As Olive Boy’s life flickers from scene to scene (often literally, thanks to a jitteringly appropriate lighting design from Adam Jefferys), we occasionally find him in a therapist’s office, his small and still frame a million miles from the brash persona he adopts elsewhere. The therapist’s voice (provided by Ronni Ancona) is distant and distorted, like a slightly more audible version of Charlie Brown’s schoolteacher – kept at arm’s length from us by a teenager who dares not communicate with the professional’s rationality.
As the depth of Olive Boy’s grief causes him to lash out at anyone who comes close, his behaviour becomes worse while still retaining its sense of hilarious bad taste and undeniable identifiability. The sense of being adrift in grief, in a family situation that feels ill-equipped to give him the support he needs, takes concrete form in Maddigan’s blistering performance and Scott Le Crass’s sensitive direction.
The pacing of Maddigan’s script is superb, allowing the narrative to jump from bawdy teenage farce (private confessionals interrupted by tales of spewing vomit) to moments when the grief hits and both Ollie and the audience stop, paralysed by the sense of loss.
At the beginning, we are told that his mother nicknamed him the Olive Boy because his skin was green when he was born, and she liked it because she thought of olives being pure and sweet. Olive Boy himself counters that olives are bitter and salty. They are both right, of course – there is a sweet purity to the boy hiding from the world behind the bitterness of his persona.
The journey of discovery into who Olive Boy really is, and how much he is really hurting, helps illustrate how some young people’s aggressive behaviour and antisocial conduct are a mask, hiding the sensitivity they are led to believe they must never show. While Maddigan draws us in with raucous, crass comedy, that outer shell is whittled away, revealing a piece of writing and performance that is supremely human in its portrayal of love and grief.
Runs until 31 January 2026
