Review: TELL ME STRAIGHT and AGGY, Park Theatre

Park Theatre’s latest double bill presents two recent works from an emerging writer, both centring average queer London lives, and the lengths we’ll go to to present the versions of ourselves we want the world to see. Both are somewhat overblown in their execution, but at their best they are imaginatively conceived, wryly observational slices of life.

Paul Bradshaw’s tell me straight is a meandering set of vignettes exploring the life of a working-class, out-of-work actor (also played by Bradshaw) hooking up almost exclusively with nominally straight men, who respond in vastly different ways to their attraction to him – with shame, with bemused interest or with violence.

Bradshaw reliably anchors the show as our protagonist, named only as Him, his expression and accent constantly code-switching based on whoever’s around him. The audience seem like the only receptacle of his authentic self, when he delivers knowing one-liners to us under a well-timed spotlight. Opposite him, Buck Braithwaite occupies a revolving door of heterosexual hookups (mostly with girlfriends), but often the pace of the script is too relentless to adequately distinguish them.

Much dramatic potential is also lost to Bradshaw’s commitment to capturing the minutiae of human conversation, which is well-observed but self-indulgent. There are lengthy chats about cinema membership schemes and school reunions that go nowhere, and too many underdeveloped subplots with different men with whom Him has chance encounters, and so the play’s real emotional meat – involving a childhood friend married to a woman – is sidelined.

Following tell me straight is Bradshaw’s somewhat more streamlined second play, aggy. Again we’re in a London flat, though it’s more upmarket this time – Gail’s packaging and Trader Joe’s tote bags are skilfully deployed around the set. Mahlik (Jean-Luke Worrell) has recently moved in with his boyfriend Lawrence (Matthew Jordan), whose family own the property.

Lawrence, a white, wealthy young ‘creative’, takes his first few steps into a vaguely defined career as artist-cum-influencer; when opportunities don’t fall easily into his lap, Mahlik gives him the idea to pull a kind of queer Yellowface and fake a non-binary identity – under the name ‘Law’ – to gain clout in the art world’s in-crowd, with predictably disastrous consequences.

Lawrence and Mahlik’s relationship simmers under the pressure of Lawrence’s deception and Mahlik’s complicity, and lends this potentially controversial plot its human touch. Harmless references to the Step Up franchise, or to Black footballers on the England team, segue quickly into racial microaggression and unacknowledged privilege from Lawrence. All the while, though, the recognisable hallmarks of any long-term relationship, the jibes and the loving eye-rolls, remain.

Their relationship is so well-crafted that one wishes Bradshaw had stripped back some of the surrounding noise. Though Bradshaw is clearly immersed in the particular side of influencer culture he’s set out to satirise, too much of the play is narrated by an oversized TikTok homepage at the back of the set. At the same time, bizarrely for a play supposedly set in 2026, an unexpected amount of plot revolves around a landline telephone.

At its core, though, this is a play about a relationship going wrong, which seems to be what Bradshaw writes best across the board. There is also an elegance to the direction of both plays, by Bradshaw and Imogen Frances, which lends the air of a choreographed dance to intimacy and violence alike. When these elements are left to speak for themselves, the result is unflinching, self-aware, and quietly profound.

Read our guest blog with writer and actor Paul Bradshaw about the two productions here.

aggy and tell me straight are at the Park Theatre until 28 March