If Dear Young Monster is not in my top 10 things at the end of this year, then… well, it will have been quite a year.
A one man show about coming out as a trans man refracted through an allegorical lens of Frankenstein (and we wonder why Alasdair wanted to go to see it [this is a cheap gag, I’m 90% certain it was me who suggested it]), Dear Young Monster is Pete MacHale’s debut solo show and my god, he is coming out of the gate strong.
There’s the elements that MacHale is directly responsible for on stage - namely the script and performance, both exceptional - and the peripheral elements too. All of these live up to MacHale - the lighting, sound, set, everything. Projections of Frankenstein and Dracula and other films appear both as is and distorted until they become abstract; the set is simple but effective, a wooden block easily becoming a TV as MacHale lies there staring at it, entranced.
One thing that strikes me, as a performer, is how genuinely impressed and jealous I am of MacHale’s ability and willingness to be physically vulnerable on stage - it begins with him crawling, convulsing across the stage, and to be able to do that in a way that doesn’t hint at an awareness of how the audience might be reacting or judging or even not taking it seriously, it’s remarkable and something I wish I could ever get close to with stand up.
Dear Young Monster undoubtedly made me emotional, and there is a lovely moment at the end where the set design quite literally comes together, two pieces of a puzzle solving and this feels, happily, like the show itself.