Adventures of Butt Boy and Tigger | Reviews

An electrifying online fantasy

Jamie and Matt are two young men indulging in the exchange of sexual fantasies over the internet. But hey, wait a minute, are those their real names? They know each other at first only as Butt Boy and Tigger, and those aren’t their real names either. What is real? Are either of them really who they say they are? Is Butt Boy really a virgin? “You could be a fourteen year old!” says one in a moment of panic. We are in wonderful, fertile territory here, and Steven Dawson’s wild and sexy script explores it to the full, spilling over the edge of the map into the nether places of the human psyche where dragons dwell.

Your reviewer once penetrated this world (no double-entendre intended). Fortunately I never met the person on the other end of the broadband connection and probably, for reasons I shall not divulge, it was a very good thing that I didn’t. Butt Boy and Tigger do, however, and this contrast between anonymous on-line relationships and real flesh and blood encounters is what makes this play so engrossing and fascinating.

It is also extremely funny. On the night I went, the audience were literally rolling in the aisles and holding their sides. It was not hard to realise why. Felix Allsop and Angus Brown have to be two of the most accomplished actors on the fringe and enact their on-line fantasies with such gusto and insane pleasure that one is swept along with their virtual relationship. From master and slave pleasures to an imagined deflowering in the trenches during the First World War, these young men explore in cyber-space the kind of things most of us never achieve in reality, or even admit to wanting to achieve. That is what the internet has done, made everything possible, at least on a virtual level. When they ultimately meet, the cold wind of reality blows, and we learn - as if we ever needed to - that people are far more complicated than their internet profiles.

The final ten minutes must rank as the most moving I have ever spent in a theatre. Those two lost cyberspace souls come face to face in a railway station and have nothing to say. And yet, Dawson’s script leaves us on an upbeat note, with a knowing wink to the human spirit. Love and human relationships will prevail, and the internet will be our slave, not our master. A brilliant, thought-provoking and deeply moving play. If you see nothing else, catch this.

Sat among a predominantly male audience, watching two male performers apparently re-enacting the racier scenes from a particularly explicit gay porn film, the thought “how did I end up here?” does cross one’s mind. However, behind the crass title and vulgar opening half lies a production that, when persevered with, is a warm, sensitive and universal portrayal of loneliness and the search for love.

The Adventures of Butt Boy and Tigger follows a series of conversations between two young men in an internet chat-room. We meet the eponymous Butt Boy and Tigger—online aliases used by the pair—as they are meeting each other, typing away at their keyboards, talking for the first time. After sizing each other up, they embark on a series of explicit sexual fantasies, performed with hilarious aplomb by Australian actors Felix Allsop and Angus Brown. During the open, frankly extraordinary scene the room is buckled over at the sight of two, fully-clothed men dry-humping each other and narrating as they go.

However, it isn't long before the formulaic first twenty minutes becomes stale, as the pair simulate a series of scenarios that would not be out of place in a grainy 70s porn flick. It is not until the pair are about to embark on the same journey for a fourth time that the mood dramatically shifts. Suddenly, the deep loneliness of Butt Boy—real name, Jamie—is revealed: here is a man unreconciled with his homosexuality, looking for love on the internet – a place which affords him the safety of anonymity.

After a vulgar, in-your-face opening, this sudden seismic shift in terms of tone and plot makes starkly apparent the plight of a desperate man. More affectingly though, the dichotomy between the hedonistic opening scenes and the more emotionally weighty climax serves to illustrate the chasm between the popular stereotyping of gay men as promiscuous and emotionally stunted and the infinately more complex reality. What is popularly portrayed as the image of homosexual relationships is first offered up as reality before it is torn apart.

From a seemingly unpromising beginning, this is a performance that reveals real intelligence and, though it feels reminiscent of a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan film, a lot of heart.