The Olive Boy
Written and performed by Ollie Maddigan
Directed by Scott Le Crass
Free Run Productions
Southwark Playhouse
Star rating: 5
The power of this show lies in its visceral truthfulness. It tells the arresting story of a teenage boy losing his mother at age 15 and is firmly rooted in Ollie Maddigan’s own experience: the confusion, the denial, the jokey front and the preoccupation with sex. After all life and hormones don’t stop simply because you’re grieving.
Maddigan is a phenomenal performer. There’s a lot of physicality in this show: sometimes almost balletic. His range of voices is riveting. When he speaks direct to the audience, he has beautifully clear articulation but sounds totally natural. He commands both the stage and audience attention. And he oozes charisma.
The structure of the show presents Ollie remembering events and reconstructing them from the characters in the school canteen, to the girl he’d like to get close to at a party and to angry conversations with the formerly absent father he now has to live with. And there are scenes with an unseen counsellor voiced by Ronni Acona which work rather well. It’s all very fast paced with video footage on the back wall of a home movie of Maddigan as a child and his mother which is used as a framing device.
Olives are thematic. The Ollie who’s a character in his own play says that he was born with a green tinge owing to a minor birth issue, soon rectified. It led to his mother nicknaming him “My Olive Boy”. At the same time he loathes olives which doesn’t stop him scoffing them at a party with disastrous (hilarious) effect. And at one point he recalls that his mother had red and green mottling on her body like an olive before she died.
This play is very funny – teenage boys can be ridiculous and Maddigan runs with that – but it’s also deeply serious. Grief is an expression of love and it’s a universal experience. You can’t get rid of it by burying it. If you face it and live with it, it’s richly empowering and means that the person you’ve lost lives on in you. It’s quite a message.
On the other hand I’m still chuckling at why sex is like fishing: if you leave your rod out in the water for long enough, sooner or later a fish will come along and put it in its mouth …
The Olive Boy started life at The Hope in 2021. That was followed by the Camden Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe, a national tour and now this run in London. It deserves to live on.
