Review: Monkey Bars

Verbatim theatre thrives on weird combinations off voices and bodies.

Travesti, a Fringe First-winning show in 2013, put women’s voices in male bodies. Robin Soans’s Mixed Up North explored racial tension by doing the same with people of different races and ethnicities.

Monkey Bars proves another PB&J combination by placing children’s words in (semi)adult bodies, asking the question: how much do we really listen to children?

The pitfall with a lot of these combinations is that eventually the novelty of hearing/seeing mismatched bodies/words can wear off. In Monkey Bars, director Siwan Clark carefully avoids this by creating two predominant kinds of scenes.

The first is what you’d expect, and usually comic; the adult actors speak and act like children. The second kind, however, is more inventive. Children’s words are stylised and spoken to make them seem like adult conversations.

Two scenes of the second kind spring to mind. The first cast children’s compliments as a kind of flirting, with the actors paired across the stage in romantic positions.

The second was a dinner party scene, portrayed with great energy by the entire cast, and tragicomically interrupted by Calam Lynch’s story of how his character fell off his bike.

The more child-appropriate material is interrupted intermittently by darker or more volatile scenes.

The play does a quick brush stroke of the political landscape, with the children giving their perspectives on war, tax, the Olympics, gender and religion.

Possible the funniest scene in the play is the gender scene, which is portrayed as a talk show between two female (Charlotte Fraser and Ros Brody) and two male (Ben Goldstein and Freddie Popplewell) panelists.

On being asked why ‘boys are sillier than girls’, Ros Brody answers ‘because they have the silly feeling in them’ and when interrupted screams ‘SORRY?’ in a authoritative tone that had the audience in stitches.

Other scenes took the darkness of their subject matter to create a real sense of unease. Two of the boys (Freddie Popplewell and Ben Goldstein) play boules and talk about divorce.

Though their tone remains casual throughout, we slowly learn that one of the boys has parents who domestically abuse each other.

The production is managed simply and well. Small cut-scenes where only one child (Connie Treves) is lit on stage, as she shares a story about a garden near her house, create moments of simple intimacy.The use of chalk to draw the stage furniture was also very compelling.

Monkey Bars is very much the opposite of your typical Oxford play. The acting is deft, the staging uncomplicated yet striking and the scenes neatly crafted. This is sweet, unpretentious drama.