Review: Furniture Boys (Underbelly George Square)
- Flora Gosling
- Aug 8
- 3 min read
Romances with rugs, flings with futons, and crushes on coffee tables
Do you ever name items of furniture in your home? Personify them to make them feel like a part of the family? A favourite in my childhood home is a mini pink sofa called Dolores. Well, writer and performer Emily Weitzman takes that idea a little further with her show Furniture Boys. In her house, items of furniture are boys she’s loved, cared for, taken in and now can’t bear to throw away. This one-woman absurdist comedy deals with themes of mortality, emotional baggage, and the artistic process, but some end up taking a backseat.
The show begins with some light humour and puns, comparing dating to shopping and boys to furniture. “He’s not that bright”, she says of a lamp, “he lets people walk all over him”, she says of a rug, it’s all titter-inducing stuff. When we get to the question “why are the boys furniture?”, her answer makes me laugh at first, assuming that the reasoning is intentionally flimsy. The obvious idea is that they represent boys she loved and lost, but Weitzman doesn’t seem that fond of their personalities. She prefers furniture because, in her mind, “they look like a boy, but shut up like a chair!”. No, what she likes about furniture is that it lives on – even outlasts its maker. The search for stability is a rich and well-loved theme, but is this the best way to explore it? If all furniture is meant to last, then the wobbly chair, ripped sofa, and precarious bookcase in my flat would like a word.
Weitzman has not overlooked this flaw in her logic; we learn that her greatest love of all is a broken wicker chair. She shows us a scenic photo shoot with it, speaks lovingly of it, and defends it as she defends the artistic process of making the show itself. This leads to a new tangent about the process of creating art, the search for meaning, and the need to be understood. There are some good ideas there, but it feels like a distraction from the point – why furniture? Absurdism doesn’t need to be neat, but Weizman’s ideas fall apart at the seams. I think the answer may lie in a video we see early on in the performance, where a much younger Weizman performs a spoken word about a fling with a pull-out couch. It puts a smile on your face to think of her playing with this idea for so long, but in practice, I wonder if it is stretched beyond its limits and leaves the audience with more questions than answers.
The metaphors may be muddled, but the show is still unique and has some endearing moments, and certainly an endearing performer. Although Weitzman appears nervous at the start, the humour of the show works because she is an unashamed weird girl, in the best possible way. It radiates from her, and there is something special about stepping into her world. After spending some time there, meditating on personalities and pouffes, you may pass a knackered mattress on the street and wonder, “Which of my exes is that?” Three stars.
Whispers from the crowd: "Quite odd. You have got to go with it, feel the flow." "I liked her saving herslf at the end. It is stepping into philosophical ideas about identity."
Furniture Boys will play at Underbelly George Square at 12:45 until August 25th
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