Review: The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Stefan Golaszewski is the sort of man who hopes to fall in love on public transport, who soaks in the city dreamily at night, who looks out of windows in moving vehicles and imagines himself to be in a music video. I know all this because I relate to him enormously. I absolutely recognize myself in his whimsical, misty-eyed monologues. Hell, if we’re honest, we all do.

Because, unfashionable though it may be, Stefan Golaszewski is a male romantic. He writes honest fantasies cluttered up with mundanities: emotional porn for men. It is a world teeming with serendipitous moments, in which women are beautiful, forward and unairbrushed, consistently droll and a little bit dirty. His stories chime with our classified daydreams – inadmissible because they clash with preconceptions of brusque masculinity. They function through private identification, blending quixotic sighs with beery banter, like strange permutations of Mills & Boon and Gavin & Stacey.

The two tales presented in tandem at The Bush, which premiered separately at successive Edinburgh Fringes, are the direct inverse of one another. In Stefan Golaszewski Talks About a Girl He Once Loved, he looks back to his gap-year at the start of the millennium and a fleeting but full-bodied romantic encounter. Stefan Golaszewski is a Widower imagines the author in 2056 as a sixty-nine year old recounting two lives entwined through a passionate, plodding marriage. Director Phillip Breen cleverly elevates this connection through design, reversing the colour scheme as in photographic negatives. However, there is perhaps a sense of overkill. It feels a touch forced. The two pieces seem to fit together like an Airfix model: you can see the joints but they could do with smoothing down.

This is, perhaps, symptomatic of Golaszewski’s chronology of process. Talks About a Girl... is an inspired original. It is beadily acute in its observations. The manner in which pop culture of the early millennium slips in almost unnoticed is exemplary. At one point, Golaszewski returns from the bar by saying “something funny like ‘only me’ or ‘this week I have been mostly eating crisps’.” More than this, it feels heartfelt: his words perfectly capturing the awkward naivety, the gawkiness of the late teenager. It’s not that Is a Widower... fails; rather that it cannot match its predecessor. Though the future history emerges wittily – The Bill, in which he lands a plum role, becomes the most watched series of the 2020’s, by which time everyone is fitted with an iChip and went through a brief phase of wearing sunglasses inappropriately – you feel that the world hasn’t been fully rounded off. You feel the gaps in history.

The second piece is so consciously fictitious, so obviously concocted, that it makes for a tricksy bedfellow. Talks About a Girl... thrives on its honesty, its self-deprecation and mockery, by making a fool of its author-performer. The details jump into life because they seem sharp recollections delicately spun. When Golaszewski talks about this first tumbling love, you don’t just sense he means it, you know he does. When he talks of marriage, adultery, fatherhood, devastating grief, reconciliation and unfathomable success – no matter how sharp the writing or how convincing the performance – you wonder how he knows. You cannot shake off the fantasy.

To be fair, though, Golaszewski understands love. Or, at least, he makes you understand love. The absence of those around him – perfect Betty, with her FHM arse and toothy smile, and near-perfect life-partner Pudding – means that we fall for his partners too. They exist as our ideals. His words leap through our ears, swish around our brains and set our hearts aflicker. We instinctively empathize with the suitcase full of paper yeses or the multi-coloured presents plonked down seeking absolution. We feel the explosions of eye-contact and lust after the kinky routines – and, credit where credit’s due, Golaszewski writes about sex exquisitely (keep an eye out for his filthy, hilarious sitcom-to-be Young, Unemployed and Lazy). But, Hollywood this is not. Heartbreak is never too far away.

Though, in hindsight, the two monologues may not twin as well as one might have imagined – certainly, Golaszewski’s writing style begins to gnaw after a full two hours, never missing a list, embellishment or flourish (sound familiar?) – he has created something a little bit special. Heartwarmingly whimsical, it is two sets of initials, framed by a heart, carved wonkily into a tree. I ♥ SG.