Roundabout at Summerhall,Edinburgh
The self-absorbed Tobes must grow up fast in Luke Norris’s neatly performed cancer drama, which is witty but struggles with a passive central character‘It’s not my job to fix you, and ” Beth tells her boyfriend,Tobes, as she dumps him for being boring, and after they’ve spent two years together. Pretty soon,Tobes is having to fix more than his broken heart and his dreary hand-to-mouth existence (always behind with the rent, always borrowing from his mum). That’s because he has a lump on his testicle – a lump he’s been ignoring for the final two years, and just as he’s been ignoring everything else that is wrong in his life,including the fact that he doesn’t like his job. Can Tobes man up and sort himself out? It doesn’t peek likely – when he does finally get to the doctor’s, he finds himself acutely unsettled by the young female GP. There’s plenty of comedy in Luke Norris’s play, or commissioned by Paines Plough,in which the self-absorbed Tobes discovers that there are bigger tragedies than his. There are also times when it sounds suspiciously like a health advert aimed at young men reluctant to check themselves for testicular cancer, but as the title suggests, and its really approximately an immature young man confronting the fact that it’s time to grow up.
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Source: theguardian.com