Review by Simon Jenner, March 20th 2025
After the caviar’s cleared away in Charlie’s butcher’s shop, Victor dismisses her curiosity. “It’s men’s business.” When Charlie suggests she could pose like that: “Who’d want to see a photograph of you, though?” he ripostes, like a recent ex-actor turned far-right commentator. “Take your clothes off. That’s better than a magazine.” Toxicity and disconnect. Yet this is Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1972 masterpiece Men’s Business freshly translated by Simon Stephens based on a literal translation by Bettina Auerswald. A production direct from Dublin’s Glass Mask Theatre directed by Ross Gaynor, it transfers to the Finborough, running till April 12th. It’s a must-see.
Rex Ryan and. Lauren Farrell. Photo Credit: Glass Mask Theatre
More intimate and excoriating than Kroetz’s The Nest and Tom Fool, seen at the young Vic (2016) and Orange Tree (2022) respectively, this flaying-back of misogyny and accommodation takes things in a direction few could predict, even now. It’s why Men’s Business is so disturbing and shockingly contemporary. It does though hint at drastic womens’ business, an agency though scorched from the corrosives of maleness: a riposte, not self-generated. Nevertheless, this play builds to an unpredictable consummation. You see the means, not the end.
Charlie (Lauren Farrell) and Victor (Rex Ryan) might tense and square off sooner if Charlie wasn’t sooo accommodating. The first point of conflict surrounds Charlie’s beloved dog Wolfie, here realised by Cooper, an affable Shepherd, whom Victor accuses of licking Charlie where he won’t. It’s one of those transgressive sexual projections – a wholly unaccommodating maleness whose focus is on his own sexual pleasure, but whose awareness of his giving no fulfilment despite Charlie’s reassurance, eats at Victor. Another is his refusal to come back to Charlie’s place, as women might get “ideas”. He doesn’t like secrets or dogs and when the two combine he presents an ultimatum. But it really doesn’t end there, nor quite how you’d predict.
Rex Ryan Photo Credit: Glass Mask Theatre
Ryan’s wired, dangerous Victor seems tensed to explode: Kroetz and Stephens’ text is a minefield strewn by an adolescent, with explosions, simmering quiet and small ignitions wounding Charlie; as Victor fires put-downs as if the shop is gaslit by Bunsen burners (indeed there is a brief use of such a torch to light a candle). You can see why Ryan’s won so many awards: his cavernous holding-in of a dark literally seeping from his wiry frame simmer son explosion. Yet he’s sparing, partly menacing, mostly morose. The highest praise Victor gives Charlie, to compensate for her not being a student paying for her education by nude modelling, is that she’s “enticing”: or just available.
Farrell, most recently seen in the National Theatre’s transfer of Dancing at Lughnasa, equals Ryan in a quiet consolatory accommodation, bordering on desperate; then a playfulness that suddenly controls the narrative that upends everything. Farrell hints not only Charlies blind belief in love whatever, with her extravagant gestures (caviar and silver on a white tablecloth in. butcher’s shop), but her laconic realism and background: inheriting the business and knowing little else, Charlie relates how some customers, knowing it’s dogfood, buy for themselves. She doesn’t ask questions. Farrell blazes with that final, extraordinary challenge.
Kroetz’s 90-minute work is textually short too. Time and atmosphere eddy as Jess F Kane’s lighting suffuses blood-red, spectral blues or gulphs of chiaroscuro whilst the two characters slowly dress or undress (there’s contents warnings), lodging in corners of Andrew Clancy’s set. Over a blast of period tracks including David Bowie (no sound credited), it’s a dog-butcher’s shop with a central tiled area boxed in by two corners and doors leading off. Upstage, and it’s all close, slabs dangle: Charlie’s often hacking and winding fat off large joints (all superlative props). A table with brief luxuries glimmers. Stage-left the couple recline up close on a bench. As with another play in London this month featuring nudity (Teatro dei Gordi’s Pandora at the Coronet) there’s no intimacy or fight direction: everything here’s realised in a rhythm here born of complete mutual trust.
Photo Credit: Glass Mask Theatre
Lauren Farrell and Rex Ryan. Photo credit Glass Mask Theatre.
Men’s Business taunting gender divides and how that poisons love, strips back the flesh of misogyny in a butcher’s shop. And ultimately flays the illusion that there should be any separate men’s business at all. Metaphors don’t need reaching for, and the work’s set in period, recognizably Germany (the magazine’s sourced there too judging by typeface). Inevitably a woman who butchers might be see to wield weapons of her own, but Kroetz is subtle. Still, you feel there might be blood, but whose? A quietly phenomenal, ground-breaking play, blistering in sumps of silence. See it.
Presented by Presented by Glass Mask Theatre in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
Stage Manager Sibéal Ni Mhaolleoin, Production Manager Migle Ryan
Production Photography Glass Mask Theatre
General Manager Jillian Feuerstein, Assistant General Manager, Esther Knowles
Producers Glass Mask Theatre, Neil McPherson, Associate Producer Julia Blomberg
Lauren Farrell and Rex Ryan. Photo Credit: Glass Mask Theatre
