REVIEW: BoHo (Theatr Clwyd, Mold)

Working in the City is hard. It's stressful. Maybe it's not as hard as coal mining or fire-fighting, and not as stressful as policing or soldiering, but in context, city slickers have a tough time, not least because of the pressures they put on themselves to be successful. To beat their colleagues and to be the best, no matter how or what.

David Jones is just another cog in the giant wheel of this industry. He wears a sharp suit, maintains a healthy body, and is great in bed (or so he tells us). But what happens when the pressure to maintain this vision of perfection starts to get too much, and the veneer begins to crumble?

Although BoHo - a co-production between Theatr Clwyd and Hijinx - takes city slicker David as its central character, this "dystopian musical misadventure" is not strictly about bankers and financiers. David is an avatar for us all, for each and every one of us making our way through life in the best way we know how. David, for all his sharp-suited, pill-popping trappings, is an everyman who hurts and feels and struggles just like the rest of us.

BoHo is, it must be said, a strange beast. It's openly peculiar, different, surprising, and often illogical. When David enters the dystopian world of BoHo, what semblance of reality existed at the start falls away and becomes an arresting amalgam of Oz and Wonderland, an otherworld where medical staff ask nonsense questions and expect you to know the answers, where the key to solving life's problems is having the right pair of shoes, and where the floor is a drum, a guitar and a piano.

It's hard to describe or summarise BoHo, but at its heart it's analysing what it's like to live in this hectic, full-on, top-gear world. Not only what it's like to live in it, but survive in it and succeed at it. City type David Jones is fit, healthy and strong, young, fun and gorgeous (demonstrated by some fantastic video projection). He's successful in work, and he's successful out of work (wink-wink). His productivity and efficiency is high, his social status is enviable. He's popular, has plenty of followers and is much "liked" on social media. He solves most of his problems by popping pills, which make everything go away (for a while). But it takes only one slip for the questions to begin, for the doubts to set in and the suspicion of inadequacy to rear its corporate head.

These doubts could be self-doubts, of course, which we all suffer from. It's not explicitly clear what or where BoHo is, but it could well be a personal state of mind, a place we retreat to inside ourselves, where we go to "sort our heads out". David is confused and confounded by the whirling, nonsense world of BoHo at first, but once he figures it out, he goes with the flow, joins in, feels stronger again. Maybe BoHo is his mojo?

BoHo is narratively ambiguous. The concept and ideas obviously came from a certain place, but devised as it is by the entire company, and not one sure point of view, it remains a fluid beast which can be interpreted in as many ways as there are people watching it. On that front, it's unabashedly brave and challenging, because it's not easy to figure out what you're being told. You have to dig up the message for yourself from the clues provided, which makes for much more rewarding theatre.

There's so much fun to be had along the way. The humour is delightfully Pythonesque at times (the scene where two doctors refer David to two specialists played by the same actors, who in turn refer him to two more specialists played by the same actors, is wondrously Kafkaesque). At other times it's just plain silly, in an endearingly ridiculous way. By the end of the production you're perfectly willing to accept the sight of a surgical procedure which sees a mobile phone, PC mouse, Lucozade bottle and a flag of Y Ddraig Goch produced from David's belly. In fact this moment is highly symbolic, because only after David has had these icons of corporate living taken out of him does he regain his self-confidence (the removal of his "Welshness" baffled me a little, but I can't say I disagree with the idea that extreme nationalism can rot you inside).

There's also a visit to see Bob Shoeman, a Wizard of Oz type character who exists as a head on a video screen and who prescribes shoes to help people solve their problems. It sounds bonkers (in fact, it is bonkers) but the shoes represent our souls. David spends most of the production in his socks, lacking shoes and thus his sole/ soul. Only when he is prescribed a particular pair of shoes and puts them on does he regain his soul, his mojo, his confidence and his ability to deal with life again. It's hardly subtle, but it works.

Playing David Jones is actor and singer/songwriter Daniel Lloyd, who has a four-square stage presence edged with the right amount of vulnerability to make the character likeable. Lloyd has a fantastic singing voice, with good range, and belts out the rockier numbers just as well as he treats the softer ones with care. Playing the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum type inhabitants of Boho are Lucy Green and Kenny Harman, who both bring fantastic individual charm to the performances. They each have a natural quirkiness which really sells the alternative humour, but when they step forward for their solo songs, they show just how much natural artistic talent they have. Green has a delicate singing voice which helps the fragility of her story, while Harman's "mad professor" persona raises some of the biggest laughs.

Director Hannah Noone has written some fantastic tunes, some of them real earworms with contagious melodies, while others are more traditional fist-pumping musical theatre numbers. The whole technical crew must be applauded for their team effort too - Erin Maddocks' simple but multi-functional quadrilateral set, Ceri James's occasionally day-glo lighting, and Jonathan Dunn's imposing video projections which populate the stage with far more people than there are present. Coupled with Barnaby Southgate's live music and you've got another example of why Hijinx won the Wales Theatre Award for Best Ensemble for their hugely popular "adult puppet show" Meet Fred earlier this year. Hijinx are true collaborators.

BoHo isn't very easy to sum up, but that's no bad thing. It has a plain central message about the pressures of modern living and how we cope with them, how we all feel different sometimes, when we don't quite fit. But the anarchic tone used to tell this story allows for interpretation. By bringing a fantastical element into the mix, the audience can find their own parallels which relate to their own experience of life, stress and failure.

Wherever or whatever BoHo is, it's yours to discover.

The stats
Devised by the company
Director & composer: Hannah Noone
Cast: Lucy Green; Kenny Harman; Daniel Lloyd; Barnaby Southgate (music)
Performed at Theatr Clwyd, Mold, between June 22nd-24th, 2017, and at Hijinx Unity Festival, Galeri, Caernarfon, June 28th, 2017. Performance reviewed: June 22nd, 2017

Links
BoHo on Theatr Clwyd website (retrieved Jun 22 2017)
BoHo on Hijinx website (retrieved Jun 22 2017)