This Will End Badly starts badly. A lone urban male tethered to the loo in his one-bedroom flat bemoans the disappearance of his girlfriend. Her departure has triggered a loss of cloacal control. But once he moves away from constipation, he becomes darkly and grippingly entertaining. Suicidal thoughts obsess him. The worst feeling in the world, he says, is to wake up knowing that you tried to end your life and failed. ‘Don’t do it,’ he counsels. Only one in 25 attempts ends successfully in death.
The rapid-fire script broadens out into a trio of voices, Misery Guts, Meat Cute and This Pain. Brutal and accurate reflections on male sexuality pile up. Meat Cute, a womanising prowler, reveals that men fetishise particular regions of the female anatomy (ankles, calves, necks, collar bones) and that they obsessively court women who bear these corporeal quirks without ever sharing the secret with the chatelaine of the erotic landmark. This is true. Less convincing is his belief that today’s sexual practices are influenced by internet porn, which gives them an indelible tincture of hatred and misogyny. Men, he claims, force their reluctant womenfolk to enact scenarios of submission learned online. And the females meekly comply with instructions from their betters. Well hardly. Romantic love could never be the slave of internet porn. And no woman would tolerate, let alone encourage, a boyfriend who plainly despised females in general and herself in particular. ‘Darling, I love the way you loathe me. Let’s get married and live hatefully ever after.’
Aside from that blip, the show is a stark and dazzling examination of the tortured male soul, and it has so much eloquent potency that the writer, Rob Hayes, must wonder why it hasn’t leapt immediately into the realm of international popularity. Well, it’s not a perfect night out. A monologue is tougher for an audience than a proper play. The focus is rather narrow, and the characters, for all their sweeping rhetoric and powers of observation, are short of humour, softness or warmth. And the structure is unsatisfying. The show ends suddenly, in mid-sentence, with a big flash of explosives where a note of measured artistic resolution would be better.
Ben Whybrow gives a virtuoso display in the three roles. The show runs for just over an hour but the script would consume 150 minutes of stage-time if enacted at newsreader speed. It’s a monumental feat of memory and performance by a sensational talent.
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