The Last Incel is a dark, sharply constructed hour of theatre that dives headfirst into the festering swamp of online incel culture – and finds something strangely human inside it.

Written and directed by Jamie Sykes and performed by a fierce Irish ensemble, this play doesn’t flinch. It throws you straight into a video call where four angry, broken men are yelling about their hatred for women, their hopelessness, their loneliness, and their obsession with labels, rituals and rules.

Each man is locked behind a homemade silver cardboard screen – like little Twitch streamers of doom – and from the outset, they’re spitting venom. But they’re also funny. Like, properly funny. It opens with a kind of incel slam poetry session, which shouldn’t work but absolutely does. It’s clever, darkly lyrical, and disturbingly recognisable. These characters are grotesques – but they’re also tragic, and heartbreakingly familiar.

There’s Einstain (Jimmy Kavanagh), excited that it’s his 30th birthday and the so-called ‘wizard’ status it confers in their online lore; Ghost (aka GoblinsGoblinsGoblins), who seems slightly lost in the shadows; Crusher, aka Jack – a reference for the Star Trek fans – (Fiachra Corkery); and Cuckboy, aka Percy (Jackson Ryan), their snarling, brittle ringleader, the one who’s really drunk the blackpill Kool-Aid.

When Crusher admits, with clear discomfort, that he had sex last night, it throws the entire group into chaos. What should be a moment of celebration becomes a betrayal. For men who have built their entire worldview around the impossibility of connection, this act of intimacy threatens their collective identity – and they turn on him with fury and disbelief.

Then along comes Margaret (Justine Stafford), the woman Crusher had sex with. She stumbles into their call and stays – half journalist, half lost soul. The show calls out her clickbait-style reporting, but also shows that she wants to become something more. She’s curious. She sees the pain under the posturing. And slowly, awkwardly, she starts to try and connect with them.

What follows is a fast, funny, gut-punching hour that uses dance, cardboard ‘screens’, stylised movement, and sheer emotional honesty to slice through the memes and the bile. There’s a hilariously grotesque “sexy” dance. A sad-boy-band routine to I Think We’re Alone Now. A euphoric Drive soundtrack dance number with sunglasses and unironic joy. And then there’s the heart of it all – the pain, the trauma, the gaping wounds beneath the misogyny.

Cuckboy’s rage turns out to be rooted in deep humiliation and parental neglect. Crusher, for all his awkwardness, just wants to be loved. Ghost and Einstain have clearly given up on the idea of ever having any affection.

The misogynistic slurs come thick and fast, mostly from Cuckboy. Margaret is repeatedly called a Becky, a foid, and worse. The show doesn’t censor its language – and nor should it. It’s a brutally honest portrait of how these men talk, what they believe, and how far they’ll go to avoid confronting their pain.

The incels, like all subcultures, have their own slang. The audience are provided with a leaflet that fills us in on the slang, featuring words like foid, Becky, Trucel. I’ve added a few of the definitions under the review.

The movement (devised by Sykes with movement director Emily Kilkenny Roddy) is stunning. At one point, the group constructs a wall of screens around a character representing Margaret’s dead brother Max, and it builds to a silent scream that left me properly weeping.

This isn’t just satire. It’s an emotional excavation. It unpacks how vulnerable young men – bruised by bullying, neglected by parents, shut out by society – can find community in all the wrong places. And how, for some, even the possibility of change is too terrifying to bear.

There’s a line Margaret delivers that stuck with me: “Sometimes the thing that makes us feel safe is the worst thing for us.” That’s the essence of The Last Incel. These boys have built a bunker out of bitterness, but it’s also the only place they’ve ever felt like they belonged.

The play doesn’t offer easy answers. But it does offer empathy. And it makes you laugh – properly laugh – even while breaking your heart and turning your stomach. With television like Netflix’s Adolescence making waves and headlines, the subject matter has never been more relevant than today.

Go and see The Last Incel before it closes its too short run on 31st May. And maybe take a friend with you who still says “Chad” unironically.

A brief glossary of incel terminology (used in this review)

Incel: Involuntary celibate. An online community of men who are willing and physically able to engage in sexual relations but unable to find partners. They believe this is due to the dissolution of traditional courtship, the rise of feminism and increased sexual promiscuity/superficiality among women.

Blackpill: Derived from the redpill/bluepill imagery featured in The Matrix. A fatalistic version of red pill thinking, it refers to an incel who has accepted the belief that women only have sex with conventionally attractive men and that they will never be able to have sex.

Chad: A physically attractive alpha male who is able to attract women and have sex.

Becky: A woman perceived as average looking. Typically depicted as brunette, thin and nerdy.

Foid: A derogatory term for a female. From female and -oid (as in android or humanoid), used to suggest that females are not fully human.

Wizard: A slang term for someone who turns 30 without ever having had sex. Often seen as a badge of pride or shame within incel circles.

The Last Incel is playing at The Pleasance Theatre until 31st May. Tickets from pleasance.co.uk

Words by Nick Barr

Photos by Dean Ben Ayre