Site-specific theatre is a tricky beast. If you find the perfect venue and use it wisely, it heightens the action. Get it wrong and the venue becomes nothing more than a gimmick – a distraction from what’s happening between the characters.  

Razor Boys is set and staged in the flat of Al – a twenty-something musician wrestling with his conscience over something he and his friend Sam did ten years previously. The audience is seated on a motley collection of chairs and stools facing the kitchen bench. Sam arrives one morning after a big night out and Al stumbles out of his bedroom and makes them coffee. 

It’s a low-key opening but there’s tension from the start. Al could do without Sam’s bragging about his latest sexual conquest, while Sam finds Al’s earnestness irritating. To avoid revealing the plot, let’s just say things quickly go south from there and the next hour is spent watching the pair – formerly best friends and soon-to-be brothers-in-law – alternately threatening each other, cajoling each other, and arguing over the merits of Steely Dan.

For me, though, the real interest of the play is how the performers use the space.

In the opening exchanges, it works perfectly – helping emphasise the mundanity of the conversation between two slightly hungover musos on a slow morning during the hot, empty week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2009. As the play goes on, though, the venue becomes more of a hindrance, effectively boxing the performers into two main areas – behind the kitchen bench and a narrow space between the audience seating and a stairwell. That’s fine for a while but as the plot thickens and the stakes get raised, the actors aren’t able to do much more than glower threateningly at each other.

At the same time, though, the proximity between the audience and the performers is thrilling. It’s probably the closest I’ve felt in the theatre to being the proverbial fly on the wall. Rather than sitting back in semi-darkness, watching the action unfold at a comfortable distance from you – physically and emotionally – you’re drawn in.

As I’ve said, the success of this sort of staging depends, in part, on the space you have to work with. More could be done with this play in a different flat – one with more room for the performers to move around and without a massive steel beam breaking up the audience’s sightlines. But the play’s success also depends on the actor’s abilities to adapt their performances to the space. When you’re standing a matter of centimetres from the audience, there’s nowhere to hide.

On opening night, Jonny Potts (as Al; Potts also wrote the play) pitches his performance at a better level for the space than Alex Greig (Sam). They are both talented actors but as their muso characters would know, you can play your instrument perfectly well but if the levels are out, the performance won’t come across as clearly as it might. That’s the sort of finetuning that comes with several performances, though, so I imagine the balance between the two will level out over the next week or so. 

However, these are minor criticisms. At its best, this play has me feeling like I am eavesdropping on an argument, and although the narrative peters out somewhat after the revelation of exactly what happened all those years ago, the real interest of Razor Boys lies not in the plot but in the relationship between the characters and the shifting power dynamics of the argument.

In the programme notes, Potts writes, “As far back as I remember, setting plays in flat has been regarded as amateurish.” Sure, there are some rough edges in this show but, far from being amateurish, Razor Boys makes for exciting theatre.

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