REVIEW: FOAM at QTopia
- Michael DiGuglielmo (they/them)
- Aug 10
- 3 min read
From the outside, the substation looks like one of those public bathrooms you see in the city, the detached red brick ones usually hiding some affront to humanity on the inside. The little room facilitates no more than a landing, however, for a flight of stairs that takes you down to a cozy little venue where (maybe keeping to some degree of verisimilitude) an actual public bathroom sits bathed in dreamy bisexual lighting on the stage!
Graffiti splatters itself on the walls, two toilets bookend a grimy sink and foggy mirror, and adjacent to all of this are the set of stairs themselves, with storage underneath the flight.
For 90 Minutes, Harry McDonald’s FOAM uses this space as the set. When the second scene of the show hits - and we’re still in a slimy public bathroom, albeit a different one - we can piece together that the story of Nicky, a gay, anglo-italian neo-Nazi skinhead, will be a story told through a sequence of grimy bathrooms.
That’s some pretty fantastic characterisation, if you ask me.
Yes, four actors came together in Qtopia’s Substation venue to tell the story of a gay neo-Nazi in the 70’s, through a sequence of bathroom stall vignettes, and the overall result was quite brilliant.
Patrick Phillips stars as protagonist Nicky, and we see his initial wariness at the false promises of fascism, and the robust life of individualism it offers, gradually turn into a bona-fide dogma. Nicky isn’t co-opting the Nazi memorabilia for shock value, or for (if I might be so anachronistic) the ‘vibes’, but because he is a true-blue fascist.
The first scene is maybe the show’s strongest, not in the sense that the quality drops after it, but GOD is it gripping. Chad Traupmann, playing an older British sophisticate named Moseley with a very poetic way of speaking about Facism, corners an underage Nicky in a club bathroom. The two actors speak about so many things without speaking about anything at all. With so many things to tip toe around—their queerness, Moseley’s Nazism—it’s a gloriously tense scene.
One scene in particular places the juxtaposition between Nicky’s two beliefs quite clearly, as he confronts a queer activist who recently got out of prison after beating a neo-Nazi within half an inch of his life (polite golf applause). The activist (Timothy Springs) is fantastic as a dramatic and emotive character, a true-punk reflection to Nicky’s parasitic Nazified ‘punk’ (down to even the pair’s clothes reflecting each other, which was a brilliant touch).
This was the only scene where the setting of a bathroom felt contrived, however. The pair speak so candidly about their viewpoints and ideology, laying it all out on the table like polite debating partners and not sworn enemies, I felt like I overdosed on dramatic irony and I lost the sting of Springs’ shock when Nicky lets slip that he was queer.
Phillips does a fantastic job playing as someone reconciling two irreconcilable things. The paradox of his queerness and his fascistic beliefs are called out in every subsequent scene. It stokes him to a brutal anger, a palpable frustration that often boils over to either explicit or implicit violence.
Patrick does occasionally skip ahead of his dialogue partner’s lines, jumping the gun a little in his haste to keep the conversations snappy, but the recovery on his and his scene partner’s behalf each time is pretty swift.
This play is nothing short of brutal. It takes a faithful, authentic look at the clash between two very different counter-cultures in Britain: the underground queer scene and the skinhead movement. FOAM asks some very important, gut-wrenching questions.
Will you forgive Nicky by the end of the play? How much responsibility for his actions and identity lay at his own feet, and how much belongs to those who shaped him along the way?
For people who want to see a dark period piece, authentic in its gruesomeness and lack of glamour, FOAM is the perfect show for you.
