Bootycandy review

O’Hara writes each scene with fierce wit. He whips the audience up with knowingly exaggerated tropes before dropping us suddenly, still laughing helplessly, into a landscape of raw pain, in which grins now look like cries for help. He challenges our complacency, without ever turning the play into a neat metatheatrical exercise. It’s a blast in every sense. The second half tears holes through the earlier scenes – through which a gimp might appear, or a life end in despair.

Fynn-Aiduenu stages the play with the swagger of a catwalk and the adrenaline of a basement club. Characters emerge from the curtains or from hatches in the set. They dare us to join in. Sometimes, they linger on the edges. Malik Nashad Sharpe choreographs sex scenes and confrontations with a light-bulb-pop intensity.

The versatile cast embraces the script’s surrealism in multiple roles. Prince Kundai moves from gawky, Jackie Collins-reading queer child to damaged adult with painful ease. Luke Wilson morphs brilliantly from the reverend’s glittering greatness into the glitching machismo of Sutter’s stepfather. Bimpé Pacheco and DK Fashola play friends, mothers and ex-lovers with huge charisma. Roly Botha brings a merciless clownishness to a drama-seminar moderator obsessed with "the Black experience”, as well as a skin-crawling drawl to a paedophile and tragi-comic pathos to a closeted man.

This production paints dark, complex themes – child abuse, homophobia, internalised shame, racial stereotyping and toxic masculinity – in subversively bright colours. That is its genius. In its dazzling glare, in the image of a young Sutter dressed as Michael Jackson, there are unsparing truths.