'I'm Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire' review — this surreal Y2K farce tackles celebrity and obsessive teen fandom

Read our review of American comedy I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire, now in performances at Southwark Playhouse through 10 August.

Former Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire is flavour of the month at Southwark Playhouse Borough, 22 years after he first donned the spider suit. In addition to cocktails named in his honour in the bar, the toilet cubicles are filled with photos of his face. In the theatre itself, the walls are collaged with what may well be every photo of Maguire ever published pre-2004 (set design by Rodrigo Hernandez Martinez). It’s Tobey’s world and we are Tobey’s girls.

First performed Off Broadway last year at The Cell Theatre, Samantha Hurley’s surreal Y2K farce I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire takes the theme of obsessive teen fandom and milks its central premise for all it’s worth. What might have been a fairly amusing 20-minute sketch is expanded to five times the length.

Many teenagers imagine what it would be like to have their favourite star all to themselves, but few have the audacity of 14-year-old Shelby Hinkley (it was John Hinckley who tried to shoot President Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster).

She has contrived to kidnap Maguire from his dental appointment in California and take him home to South Dakota, where she’s chained him up in her basement and plans to force him into “marriage”. If he doesn’t love her immediately, he’ll eventually succumb to Stockholm Syndrome (as per her instruction manual Kidnapping for Dummies), and that’ll be good enough.

Reprising her role from New York, Tessa Albertson (who played Sutton Foster’s daughter on the sitcom Younger) performs at full throttle as the unfortunate Shelby, who’s bullied at school and has an absent father and a QVC-addicted mother who ignores her. Essentially, she’s a middle-school Miss Havisham whose only guidance regarding love and relationships comes from the questionable wisdom of Cosmopolitan.

As the great heartthrob, Anders Hayward is a convincing ringer for the young Maguire, who has already found that stardom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. With the film star glamour stripped away and no reason to turn on the charm, Tobey isn’t quite what Shelby expected: more like a random guy in the basement (albeit one who’s good with butterfly clips).

He has mentioned in several interviews that his favourite film is Citizen Kane, so he’ll sound smart, but he actually prefers Shrek. What you read in the press isn’t real, and whether this is “real” or a hallucination on either side is anyone’s guess.

The pitch and volume at which the entire performance is delivered means that several of the punchlines get thrown away and the tragedy of Shelby’s situation doesn’t resonate like it should. Kyle Birch’s cameos ramp up the hamminess to an unbearable level. For an exploration of problematic fandom and parasocial relationships, Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder! covers some similar ground also through a comic lens, but with much more heart.

Never meet your heroes, or at least don’t force them to pee in a bucket decorated with stickers and a cutesy label. The show was rapturously received by the opening night audience and it would have been lovely to have been similarly charmed or at least to have submitted to Stockholm Syndrome, but, really, it was a relief to leave the madhouse.

I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire is at Southwark Playhouse to 10 August. Book I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire (Photos by Manuel Harlan)