Showing between Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th May 2009 @ Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol
Showing as part of Mayfest 2009, Bristol’s festival of contemporary theatre

Shirley is obsessed with the glow-in-the-dark stars above his bed that don’t glow, his dead brother’s disappearing trumpet and the only boy in the school with a name worse than his - Subway Darling (after a Petula Clark lyric, in case you were wondering). A medieval textbook illustration with a pretty comprehensive line in injuries and the weapons that caused them, reincarnated as a silver-thong-sporting super hero, would seem an unlikely answer to our teenager’s woes, but then writer and performer Chris Goode’s story of Wound Man and his gawky sidekick is an unlikely one.

It’s familiar enough territory - all growing pains and adolescent yearning (albeit with a same-sex bent), but it still manages to get you where it hurts, which is largely down to Goode’s genial stage presence and Wound Man himself - a richly satisfying comic-melancholic creation if there ever was one. Turning up in the aftermath of every suburban disaster, Wound Man’s super power is looking how other people feel: a little girl wakes up after having been knocked over by a car, is asked where it hurts and points at Wound Man, saying; ‘over there’.

As a cipher, or scapegoat for, or external representation of all mankind’s inexpressible pain, Wound Man is hard to beat. Thankfully, neither this point nor the story’s socio-political concerns are laboured, and are perhaps all the more effective as a result. For this is essentially good old-fashioned bedtime storytelling and some over-fussy lighting and an at times attention-seeking soundtrack occasionally detract from a performance whose strength is its very unshowiness and writing which, when it’s not being too self-referential, is at once taut and lyrical, with some great one-liners and really joyous flights of fancy.

Goode never really seems at home in the highly stylised bedroom that is his set, all comic-book cross-hatchings and Blondie posters, and the animation that tops and tails the show, whilst lovingly made, didn’t really add anything for me. Nevertheless, with the characters Wound Man and Shirley he has hit the nail on the head. They may not be a particularly dynamic duo, but that’s kind of the point. By going for bathos over vim, Goode has created a resonant and affecting piece of theatre.

www.mayfestbristol.co.uk

Carrie Rhys-Davies