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If you can’t stomach two hours of moose knuckles spilling out from Spandex crotches then steer clear of ‘Lardo’, Mike Stone’s brilliantly barmy play about the theatre of pro-wrestling.
Tubby wrestling nut Lardo (Daniel Buckley) wants to be hired by Tartan Wrestling Madness, Glasgow’s answer to WWE. They have a series of lurid characters on their books – Wee Man, Gold-digger, Whiplash Mary (‘a storm in a D-cup’) – but it’s run by the ferocious Stairs (Nick Karimi), who couldn’t care less if his wrestlers break a wrist or detach a retina.
Lardo’s hired and suddenly we’re the ringside audience. It’s mayhem. There’s an actual wrestling ring on stage, and full-on matches: clotheslines, elbow drops, the lot. Stairs makes us chant and – half-heartedly at first as we clutch glasses of house white, then ever louder – we whistle and whoop. It’s impossible not to get sucked into the sheer electric joy of these matches, feeding some animalistic desire to see victory and defeat, to see grown men groping each other like teenagers necking on a first date.
Between the matches, a storyline with dark undercurrents unfolds. Each character is carefully drawn and beautifully acted, particularly Karimi’s vicious Stairs and Buckley’s endearing Lardo. Stone does demand huge gear shifts from us as we move in an instant from the grim drama of these characters’ lives to the artificial mania of the ring.
The bouts are the best kind of theatre: we still get that adrenaline thrill even though we know it’s all fake. Except, as Stairs becomes increasingly sadistic in his attempts to bag big audiences the punches are no longer pulled and the play asks where fake ends and real begins. There are whiffs of ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Foxcatcher’ – a young gun trying to impress a deranged mentor – and a sideways glance at that old question of how far is too far when it comes to entertainment, but mostly it’s an excuse for choke-slams and Lycra.
This is an exuberant play that’s desperate to burst out of its tiny theatre, a brilliant way of exorcising those brutal Freudian fantasies of sex and violence. For Stone, all the world’s no longer a stage – it’s a wrestling ring.