TEENAGE DREAMS, AND FAME AS NIGHTMARE
Got to love the dedication of the Southwark: to mark its smaller-space production of Samantha Hurley’s New York play about a demented teenage fan, it lined the cubicles in the lavatory with posters of the sulky baby-face of Maguire, and Spiderman fanzine covers. Once you enter The square three-sided space a further explosion of Tobeyiana hits you, with fairylights. On the floor big woolly rugs, on the shelves toys playing a hand-puppet fantasy of a Mermaid King and a princess. It’s a teenage basement den , a prison of longing and unattainable desire.
It will remind anyone of being 14, though fandom seems to have turned wilder since my friend Katy and I fantasised about stowing away in Paul McCartney’s trunk on his American tour (such was our innocence we had no idea what we expected on emerging). In this case Shelby – played with terrifying ferocity by Tessa Albertson – has read KIDNAPPING FOR DUMMIES and successfully captured Maguire – Anders Hayward – and handcuffed him to a pipe. There are references to the dark thriller MISERY, and when Shelby appears in tatty bridewear at full shriek, mouth Munch-open, the terror is so extreme that for a while I reckoned this was a nightmare of the victim’s. Not so. He thinks at first it is a delusion while recovering from dental anaesthesia and drugs in his system, then that it’s a prank of his manager or agent’s. Shelby on the other hand is just hellbent on owning him, as self-defined president of his fan club. It takes a laser shock to make him say “I do”, and none of his resistance dents her determination.
The play runs solid at 110 minutes, and could well be trimmed: but New York loved it, the players are remarkably good and Tyler Struble’s direction fluent and full of small surprises. The conversations, conflicts and doubts both sides are often very funny, but its merit is in allowing pathos and a rounded, stroppy sense of emerging character to Shelby : neglected fatherless child of a QVC-addicted mother, bullied at her school and its Prom. There’s subtlety too in a wonderful performance by Hayward as her captive. Just as her half-grown Cosmopolitan-magazine mentality is often dented by saving streaks of realism, his horror and disbelief is tempered by awareness that he had already been trapped by his fame, and by the thousand interviews and biographies which create him as a dream persona. When she finds out some of the interviews were nonsense she shouts “You’re not MY Tobey Maguire!!” And he has to agree. “Fame is very sticky, it gets all over you”.
The third figure, occasionally, is Kyle Birch, large-scale and comedically rresistible, who appears in the wall as a kind of inner Tobey who doesn’t buy his stardom at all, sometimes as an invisible shouting mother upstairs, and finally as a very enjoyable nightmare grotesque : a realtor come to measure and sell the house. Meanwhile Tobey somehow escapes and reappears irritably trying to get out of his Spiderman suit. A sharper, earlier ending would have made it a better play. But you can’t find fault with the cast. Especially Hayward, who I hadn’t seen on stage before, and much hope to see again.
southwarkplayouse.co.uk to 10 August
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