Wesley Guimarães and Jack Lancaster deliver a pair of searing star turns as 19-year-old Londoners with an explosive shared past history in Sophie Swithinbank’s Bacon, brilliantly reconceived by director Michael Matthews for its West Coast Premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre.

It’s been four years since barista Mark (Guimarães) last laid eyes on Darren (Lancaster), just one reason why Mark is thrown for a loop when he spots his former classmate in the cafe where he works, “standing bold as brass, sticking out like a fucking dinosaur from my past, having the the fucking nerve, to exist.”

What follows is a series of flashbacks (interrupted by multiple returns to the tension-filled present) during which we get to know a bright, studious, introverted biracial transfer student living with his Brazilian-born mother and his polar opposite, a white lad from the projects (or “council estates” as the British so quaintly call them) with a tough-guy attitude at school and a violent single father at home.

Mark is the kind of boy who takes pride in “color-coding” the world population map he’s been assigned to draw for class, who takes pains to inform a not so bright classmate “invaluable” is not a synonym for “valuable,” and who dresses up his only friend (his dog Barney) in a Christmas waistcoat because why shouldn’t a pet be dressed in holiday finery?

Darren, on the other hand, is the kind of boy who cheekily informs the cashier at the drive-through window that she can’t invoke the “vehicles only” rule where he’s concerned because “I’m on the vehicle of my legs innit” and then feels “fucking powerful coz the woman must of just give me the nuggets just coz she knows that I’m the fucking king.”

He’s also the kind of boy whose widowed father “does fuck all all day” and when he’s had a few too many, has no problem taking out his frustrations on his son.

And he’s the kind of boy who will call Mark a pervert one minute and then follow that with a plaintive “You just gonna leave me here?” when Mark has finally had enough of Darren’s taunting.

In other words, audiences hoping for a feel-good, opposite-attract love story like Nick and Charlie’s on Heartstopper won’t be finding that here, but that doesn’t make Bacon any less compelling, or leave audiences any less invested in Mark and Darren’s intersecting lives.

It helps enormously that one of Los Angeles’s most consistently brilliant directors has imprinted Swithinbank’s Off West End sensation with his own inspired stamp, first of all by resituating the action from atop an oversized playground seesaw to a more literal locale (Mark’s cafe where the present-tense scenes take place) and allowing our imaginations to do the rest for the flashbacks.

 It’s a director’s concept that allows designer Stephen Gifford the opportunity to not only transform Rogue Machine’s ultra-intimate upstairs Henry Murray Stage into a London cafe with bench seating and red brick walls (scenic painting and murals by Jenny Flack Murals) but to light it ever so effectively as well, with Christopher Moscatiello’s drama-enhancing sound design and Christine Cover Ferro’s just-right costumes completing a grade-A design mix.

You won’t see two more sensational performances around town than Guimarães’s heartbreakingly vulnerable, achingly real Mark and Lancaster’s troubled, conflicted, loose cannon of a Darren, and their spot-on albeit entirely distinct London accents (Tuffet Schmelzle is dialect coach) make their performances all the more actor-transforming and authentic.

Add to that some risk-taking physical intimacy (directed by Joy DeMichelle) and a shocking eruption of violence (Jen Albert is fight choreographer) and you’ll be talking about these two actors’ work for days.

 Bacon is produced by Justin Okin, Mark Giberson, Lexi Sloan, and Betsy Zajko.

Rich Wong is stage manager. Grant Gerrard is technical director. Rachel Ann Manheimer is production manager. Casting is by Victoria Hoffman.

 As edge-of-your-seat gripping as it is emotionally gut-punching, the West Coast Premiere of Sophie Swithinbank’s Bacon is the very definition of must-see theater. Get ready to be blown away.

Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles. Through March 30. Mondays and Fridays at 8:00. Saturdays and Sundays at 5:00.
www.roguemachinetheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
February 23, 2025
Photos: Jeff Lorch

Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Rogue Machine Theatre, Sophie Swithinbank