Eddy Brimson’s Naughty Boy haunts the dark alleys and late-night empty train carriages of our nightmares. David Zampatti rides along.
Reviews/Fringe World Festival/Performance/Theatre
Joe being naughty and not very nice
6 February 2023
- Reading time • 4 minutesTheatre
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Naughty Boy, Eddy Brimson
Belgian Beer Cafe, 5 February 2023
Joe is not nice. He’s foul-mouthed, deeply misogynist and dangerously violent.
Yet somehow, in the hands of Naughty Boy’s writer and performer Eddy Brimson, we recognise his humanity – and allow ourselves to ask “why?”.
Joe’s life is a whirl of misadventure framed in a weekend of pub toilet debauchery and murderous brutality on a trip north from London. It might be soccer-related and, guessing again, dressed in the yellow colours of Fulham FC.
Along the way he reminisces about friends and foes, his mate Iffy and his confused sexual exploits in the fleshpots of Bangkok, or the three not-so-innocent lads Joe and his mates dish it out to on the train.
There’s also a hole in Joe’s heart and he searches for the reason for it. He mourns “the loss of the identity of which he should be so proud” as he sees the old butcher shops on main streets replaced by chains.
He is angered by the failure of institutions and sentimentalises the loss of innocence – he still grieves the death of a duck he accidentally shot with an air rifle and a cat he saw killed by a car, though he is quite capable of inflicting the same injuries to a man with his bare hands in a tube station.
Brimson is a captivating performer – his experience as a comedian stands him in good stead, though there’s precious little humour in Naughty Boy. He carries an hour-long rapid fire monologue with no lapses in pace or intensity.
Equally though, Brimson’s narrative is at times confused and opaque. It is bookended by Joe apparently an orderly at a mental hospital – or is he a patient? Either way, the purpose of these scenes is unclear and Brimson’s depiction lacks the power and interest of the rest of his story.
It’s a pity, because while Joe is certainly not someone you’d want to meet down a dark alley or in an empty train carriage, you can’t ignore or deny him.
Pictured top: Eddie Brimson as a very ‘Naughty Boy’. Photo: supplied.
Naughty Boy continues on 11 – 12 and 18 – 19 February at the Belgian Beer Cafe.
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