Nasty Boy Rating:

The Nasty Boy of the title is indeed a snarling, sneering, foul-mouthed, aggressive, feckless youth, mindlessly channel surfing and too idle even to change out of his pyjamas. Or so he would like us to believe, though writer Jim Maddens drops enough hints that he may not be quite the bully he would like to be.

His mother, apparently in a world of her own, hoovers around him, ignores the increasingly scabrous insults and makes him a cup of tea. Into this bizarre household, the bastard offspring of an unnatural union between Joe Orton and the Royle family, comes Denis Tuck, a sweating, ingratiating door-to-door salesman who, since we’re on the subject of unnatural unions, might well be the result of a chance encounter between Arthur Miller and Quentin Tarantino.

Jim Madden himself plays Tuck as he attempts to sell the family a potato masher, chopping board, cleansing fluids and snap-top plastic buckets among other things. His sales pitches, in a desperate attempt to get the family’s attention away from their own bickering, take flight into elaborate, even rococo rants on the weirdest subjects up to and including particle physics.

Bludgeoned into awestruck silence, the son finally realizes that if he is going to make himself “interesting” by acting “disturbed” he is going to have to go some way to cope with nutters like Tuck. The mother ends up with a handful of household goods she doesn’t want. And Tuck goes on his way.

It’s a very weird little piece this, very funny in parts and black and disturbing in others. The production is unhelpful, not at all sure of what tone it is trying to adopt and only Madden himself comes close to the level of violence in the performance that matches the language. But there is something going on here in the writing that is worth watching.

Robert Dawson Scott

Friday, 10th August 2001 scotsman.com

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