Simeon Barclay Grapples with British Working-Class Masculinity
At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, the artist’s debut live performance pulses with visceral intimacy and raw vulnerability
At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, the artist’s debut live performance pulses with visceral intimacy and raw vulnerability

For The Ruin (2025), Simeon Barclay expands his practice with his first live performance. The subject – the artist’s hazy memories of growing up in Huddersfield, UK, in the 1980s – is the same as in many of his installations and sculptures, but now the media are human bodies and musical instruments: the artist melds his words – inflected by poetic contractions and expansions – with percussion (James Larter) and horn (Isaac Shieh).
On the fog-covered stage of the black box theatre, three performers wearing monochrome ensembles face an attentive audience. From the low rear of the stage, two ochre beams pierce the darkness; they resemble headlights. Barclay begins, ‘Move up nuh man!’, as the horn repeats a dry and raspy drone while the metallic pitter-patter of drums echoes through the room. He tells us he is in a car ‘on the M62’ – one of the UK’s busiest motorways. Maybe he is going through a tunnel; maybe, once he emerges, the streetlights are reflected in the wet asphalt. His destination is ‘nightclubs’, and his desires are two-fold: to be a gallant knight ‘[crowned] in valour’ but also to ‘escape’ from the constrictive archetype of British working-class masculinity.
The performers convey this conflict through oppositions between coarser and smoother sounds, harder and softer imagery, and the tempestuous weather that waylays the journey. In a variation of his central refrain, he emphasizes the car’s claustrophobia, ‘Squeeze up nuh man!’ I imagine this figure sitting tense and self-conscious, thinking about how to gain homosocial approval. He is physically and socially held ‘in [his] place’. After the plosive ‘boisterous banter and bluster’, the instruments suddenly and briefly halt and the men, Barclay tells us, share a ‘tacit intimacy’.
The emotional breadth and depth of working-class men is also represented in the landscape and infrastructure that surrounds their labour. The pitch of Larter’s percussion increases in the office of former UK prime minister Harold Wilson, who invested seven million GBP to build the M62 on peatbogs. (This scene is difficult to follow without the context from the handout.) Returning to the motorway, the percussion deepens and repeats to reflect the rhythm of construction work. The motive of the workers is, again, ‘valour’; they want to excavate rocks and apply the concrete ‘roughshod’. However, with gentle sibilance, Barclay describes the ‘silent, soft and tacit resistance’ of the mud that the workers must attune to with sensitivity, whether they know it or not.
In the second half of The Ruin, which is altogether more moving than the first, the action moves from the motorway to the Barclay’s childhood living room. It is here that he learns his notions of masculinity from his father. As if reciting Biblical commandments, Barclay mimics his father’s words: ‘You mustn’t run,’ ‘You mustn’t cry,’ ‘You mustn’t be ‘fraid.’ The words are said with such rhythm that you can’t help but want to dance. In a counterpoint by now typical, Barclay, still speaking as his father, adds, ‘You must feel.’ The horn here is flaccid and the percussion has a jazz-like chaos, signifying the decline of ‘empire’ and its ‘bastard son’ – their loss of authority and virility, their hypocrisy. At times, the script is laced with the spite of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ (1962).
The Ruin is not a passé postmodern theatrical portrayal of gender and class roles.
In ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1990), theorist Stuart Hall characterized the Black British experience in the 1980s, an era of exclusion and separation, as centred around the question of belonging. In The Ruin, Barclay wryly recalls his family finding their sense of belonging in living ‘the English way’. His father, a tailor, nips and tucks his son into an ‘armour’ that imbues him with confidence; perhaps it is ‘the wool worsted double-breasted suit’ of Huddersfield-raised film star James Mason, referenced in part one as ‘the prodigal son’. The suit is seen elsewhere in Barclay’s oeuvre in Knights (2022). He appropriates ‘the English way’ (the score and the lights are carnivalesque, far removed from a stiff upper lip) to traverse space that is otherwise inaccessible.
However, The Ruin is not a passé postmodern theatrical portrayal of gender and class roles. The penultimate line has stuck with me: ‘A form that gives you definition but seeks to erode you.’ What part of us is lost when we adopt an identity, particularly under precarity? For an artist who made a self-portrait as a giant inflatable Donald Duck (2023), this performance adds visceral intimacy and vulnerability to his practice.
Simeon Barclay’s The Ruin was commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art. It happened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, on January 16
Main image: Simeon Barclay, The Ruin, 2025, performance documentation. Courtesy: the artist and the Roberts Institute of Art; photograph: Anne Tetzlaff