Sitting down in Soho Theatre’s largest space, surrounded by pulsating music and the expectation of a performance about male strippers, you’d be a fool to expect subtlety. Yet, with some terrific individual performances and a lot of hard work, Tender does well to keep to a consistent message in this bold, provocative production.
Reuniting Tambo and Bones writer Dave Harris with director Matthew Xia, Tender thrusts us (literally and metaphorically) into the failing Dancing Bears Club, a nightly male strip act consisting of muscular Trae (Kwami Odoom), sex-mad Geoff (Dex Lee) and former adult film performer Donny (Darren Bennett) which is losing its audience, succumbing to its bigger, better and more well-endowed competitors over the road. What starts as a look at male sexuality, bravado, and a desire to last as long as you can in the bedroom becomes something a little more interesting with the arrival of the club owner’s daughter B (Jessie Mei Li), charged with turning the club around but instead forcing the three men to reconcile with their own masculinity, desires and position in the world.
The production has a lot of potential, and the energy and talent of all four performances bring a chaotic and riotous production together with some cohesion, yet Harris’ script feels a little unfocused. The exploration of the trio of men is somewhat interesting. Odoom’s young Trae is eager to please his girlfriend in the bedroom, perhaps at the expense of his own pleasure, while Lee’s Geoff, permanently thinking about his own manhood, eventually reflects on the impact his uber-sexualised masculinity has on him and those around him.
Meditative Donny is brought to the fore neatly by Bennett, who, despite being the senior performer of the three, resists the temptation for it to become sleazy. Meanwhile, Li’s B, battling her own unique sexual desires and a volatile relationship with her estranged mother, drags the men into a place of vulnerability despite her own limited experience of these settings, where the collision of personalities transforms into something more poignant.
That said, the piece does, on occasion, fall into its own trap of relying too much on provocative, explicit humour and even cartoonish exchanges and characterisations, stunting its message. There are genuinely moving and breakthrough moments for all four characters, yet these get eroded by the eagerness to get to another punchline or yet another dick joke. It works, but it does not feel as original as it could be, and one wonders whether a little cutting down and reframing the piece to be without an interval would be beneficial.
There is, though, certainly nothing quite like it in a theatre right now. Audience members, armed with a thumbs up and thumbs down paddle, can request to be part of the show, earning a lap dance for their troubles, and there is something deftly subversive about whether the whooping and cheering is morally right when thinking about how, for these men, their own sense of worth in their sexuality appears to be stripped back by their desire to please others.
Tender is not for the faint-hearted, and absolutely goes beyond comfort points in terms of what you see and hear, yet there, underneath, is a very clear message about sex and masculinity, told from a different perspective of men who seem on the surface to enjoy their self-objectification and whether, in the era of Magic Mikes, they should do at all.
This review was originally written for Adventures in Theatreland.
