Review: TENDER at Soho Theatre

Stuart King 30 April, 2026, 23:00

Hip-hop sounds pervade the air as you enter Soho Theatre’s big space for TENDER. A raised stage is bedecked (like an unglamorous utilitarian backroom) with a few tired chairs, a desk with a monitor screen, an ironing board, shelved cleaning products and a container of what looks like protein powder. The only real clue of what may be coming, are the gobo projections scrolling around the floor of the playing area and a couple of floor to ceiling chrome poles mounted either side of the stage.

Jessie Mei Li, Darren Bennett, Kwami Odoom and Dex Lee in Dave Harris's TENDER at Soho Theatre, directed by Matthew Xia. Photo credit Alex Brenner

We’re backstage at the club where three guys (Dex Lee, Darren Bennett and Kwami Odoom) perform a strip club dance routine as The Dancing Bears. The venue established by a woman, for women to let their hair down, manages to circumvent the otherwise puritan New Jersey public decency laws through the deployment of a live-show filming clause.

Written by Dave Harris and directed by Matthew Xia, the show leans heavily on male notions of masculinity and a superficial understanding of what women want. When the business sees a downturn in trade due to competition from a new troupe (The Dancing Bulls offering bigger and better everything just a few blocks away), the owner sends in her daughter (Jessie Mei Li) who is authorised to make an assessment and take the necessary steps to get the business back to its old money making ways. Thereafter the guys get in touch with their feelings, express a lot of angst, make some personal discoveries and learn a few lessons about what women really want. Perhaps more importantly in the context of the piece, they gain a better understanding of what they want, which interestingly flips the clichéd notion of all men rolling over and falling asleep once they have ‘achieved satisfaction’.

There are issues with the format of the production given that energised erotic show performance forms part of the play. These naturally rely on a-whooping’ and a-hollerin’ atmospherics from engaged patrons, to create atmosphere. In a theatre setting, this means necessarily breaking the fourth wall to ensure interaction at key points to be successful. Once engaged however, not all audience members know when to call time on their participation, which can be a distraction to the flow of the piece and disruptive during sensitive and revealing moments in the writing. These gripes aside, TENDER proves a funny and occasionally moving and insightful foray into a world most of us will never otherwise encounter and the cast acquit themselves with gusto and deliver moments of genuine hilarity.

TENDER continues at Soho Theatre until 6th June and runs 2 hours 20 mins including interval.