Tender
Tender arrives at Soho Theatre off the back of considerable buzz. Writer Dave Harris and director Matthew Xia reunited after their five star Tambo and Bones, and with Jessie Mei Li leading the cast, expectations were understandably high.
The show opens promisingly. Classic pop bangers, high-energy choreography and stripping routines that spill directly into the audience, performers grinding on willing participants clutching green thumbs up paddles (a red thumbs down option existed, though it was rarely spotted). The movement is impressive, the atmosphere electric, and for a while it feels like the evening is going to deliver something genuinely exciting and new.
The premise is strong too. The Dancing Bears, a failing male strip club on the brink of collapse, are forced to confront their individual and toxic relationships with masculinity when their boss's daughter arrives to shake things up. There is a genuinely interesting conversation buried in the text about male pleasure and how so much of it is really just ‘performing patriarchy’, a point that felt sharp and full of potential, though one the production never quite committed to exploring with the depth or originality it deserved.
Harris' writing is dynamic and frequently funny, and the characters feel familiar in the best way. Kwami Odoom is the standout, delivering a ferociously energetic monologue as Tray that briefly makes you feel the show is about to click into something more memorable. Yet within it, a comment about women feeling like vessels during sex landed uneasily, and whilst it was clearly intended to expose rather than endorse that worldview, the framing left the point frustratingly ambiguous.
The production's bigger issue is its female character, who functions largely as an emotional catalyst for the men around her, an anchor they each latch onto in order to find their own voices. There is an irony in a show about men shedding the weight of toxic masculinity, placing that responsibility squarely on the shoulders of its only woman. A scene in which her character climaxes on stage, silently, for close to a minute, felt emblematic of the show's wider struggle: provocative in intention, uncertain in execution, and not entirely sure what it wanted its audience to feel.
There are beautiful lines scattered throughout, "I don't think anybody will ever remember me the way I remember them" among them, and the cast are committed and charismatic throughout. But Tender, for all its raunchiness and promise, never quite finds the concrete meaning it is reaching for. It knows what it wants to say. It just hasn't yet worked out how to say it.
Theatre: Soho Theatre
Reviewer: Frances Harris
Date: 30/04/2026
Stars: 2
