Richard Gadd’s at it again. His unforgiving new drama tackles the damage men do to each other head on, by pulling out his insides and smearing them everywhere. Every man should watch this queasy masterpiece
W
e have known for some time, I think, that men are not OK. Richard Gadd’s new drama, conceived before his astounding, semi-autobiographical creation Baby Reindeer sent his reputation stratospheric, and now broadcast in the slipstream of that success, is a fiercely intelligent, unforgiving, harrowing attempt to show us how and why.
Half Man begins in the present, with two men circling each other in a dark barn. One, Niall (Jamie Bell), is in full Scottish wedding fig. The other, Ruben (Gadd), is stripped to the waist and has his hands wrapped like a sparring boxer. The fight that is surely about to come does not seem a fair one.
We then flash back over 30 years – and six brutal episodes – to piece together the men’s shared story. We first meet gentle, bookish Niall at 15 (when he is played by Mitchell Robertson), as he is being horribly bullied – and let the unrelenting agony of this scene prepare you for everything to come – by other boys in his class. His day goes from bad to worse when he hears that Ruben (Stuart Campbell – like Robertson, turning in an altogether phenomenal and hopefully career-making performance), the 17-year-old son of his mother’s partner, Maura, has been released from the young offenders’ institute to which he was sent after biting off a boy’s nose, and is coming to live with them all.
