Writer: Majid Mehdizadeh
Director: Adam Welsh
What are the origins of male anger, the need to start fights and actively look for reasons to be violent? Transferring to the Soho Theatre from Liverpool Everyman where it was first performed in 2020, Majid Mehizadeh’s monologue Y’MAM: Young Man’s Angry Movements explores one man’s struggle with his impulses, as a history of extreme behaviour becomes an inward reflection on childhood, friendship and fear.
Spoiling for a fight, the grown-up Majid struggles to keep friends as drunken nights out spiral into violent encounters. It is a pattern that he recognises from his school days, a cycle of lairy behaviour, crossing a line and a change of mates until it all starts again. When Majid meets Daisy and begins to find work as an actor, he wants to change but to do that he needs to understand why he’s so angry in the first place.
Y’MAM is a play about split personality, about being two people at the same time and anyone unfamiliar with the writer and performer, this story that is sometimes about Majid but also about Luke may be a little confusing. They are, however, one and the same, although Mehdizadeh is given the writing credit and alter ego Luke Jerdy listed as the performer, a split that even on the one page paper programme says so much about the division that Mehdizadeh feels within himself and which this show attempts to mine.
It is, of course, searingly honest about the cost of that division and it is a credit to Mehdizadeh’s writing that he’s not looking to be liked, pitied or forgiven, in fact his prose has a robust swagger, almost a pride in its confrontational style that forms the confidence and brio of young man ready to snap at any moment. The cheeky chappy façade fuelled by drugs, football and testosterone builds nicely in the early part of the show but is never sympathetic.
Structurally, Y’MAM is a lot to keep track of. It begins in the middle as Jerdy wins a role on Hollyoaks and meets Daisy before cutting back in time as a young Mehdizadeh moves to Derbyshire where he becomes the aggressor, hitting out before others can attack him. But the show also mixes in therapy sessions, original songs and spoken word poetry, photographs, home videos and Jerdy jumping in and out of characters that creates an intense but sometimes too chaotic effect.
What the show lacks is any decisive conclusion or answers to the questions Mehdizadeh sets out to address. Therapy that blames the parents is a rather pat conclusion and as the show builds to a fast-paced speech about the failures of modern masculinity, the culture of violence and responsibility for all war and atrocity, the show glosses over how society can correct its course, what men need to do to break generational patters and how Majid Mehdizadeh can reconcile himself to Luke Jerdy and vice versa.
Jerdy’s performance is, however full of energy that barely flags over 80-minutes of continual performance. It is in turn shocking and funny – particularly an ego-fuelled email from Jerdy to a theatre bar manager – with a self-deprecating tone that casts a critical eye over his own behaviour. If it feels like a work in progress then perhaps that’s because its writer is too and in another couple of years Y’MAM may be another play entirely.
Runs until 4 June 2022
