Lead us not into temptation
Lloyd Evans
Blowing Whistles Leicester Square Theatre Faces in the Crowd Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court
Oh, what a gay play. The exhibitionist bravado of gay culture, its carnival antics and exuberant self-sufficiency convince us straight folk that we have nothing more to learn about this colourful subterranean neverland. Matthew Todd’s comedy is packed with welcome surprises. It opens with a pair of London swingers, Nigel and Jamie, awaiting a 17-year-old blind date trawled from an internet site. The boy turns out to be a blond-ringleted chav from Croydon, whose angelic looks and towerblock insouciance immediately confound their expectations. He’s bisexual, for one thing. ‘I like c**t,’ he tells the ogling queens. ‘I’m sure you do,’ says Jamie unruffled, ‘but I bet you couldn’t eat a whole one.’ After a night of passion, Jamie and Nigel are still individually attracted to the chav but the self-imposed rules of their swinging operations forbid further contact.
The play’s second half follows the emotional aftershocks as the older men are torn between resistance and surrender to the curly-headed temptation. This is the perilous chemistry of troilism. To triangulate a relationship will work only if the incoming element affects the existing elements in identical shades and modes of feeling. And that will never happen. What startled me was how familiar all this felt: if you take the Judy Garland posters out of a gay relationship you have a straight relationship. The joys of bed-hopping are exposed as transient and illusory, and open relationships feature all the hassle-free fun of open-heart surgery. The couple’s ‘rules’ turn out to have been inspired by the promiscuous, swaggering Nigel to impose his reckless tastes on the timid, apron-wearing Jamie and to provide emotional surety against Jamie’s jealousy.
The pleasure of this production, deftly directed by Pete Nettell, is the range of its accomplishment. The first act is a dashingly witty comedy of manners and the second act ascends into an agonising and beautifully detailed portrait of a relationship foundering on the rocks of manipulation and deceit. Best of all, it’s a wonderfully eloquent lament, a tragic meditation on gay disillusionment. Sexual deregulation has led gay men into a sort of ecstatic purgatory, a vodka-fuelled Walhalla of drag-queens, rubber-fetishists and Spartacus-lookalikes, a competitive merry-go-round of sweet dreams and fractured hopes, a hedonistic tunnel-of-love whose defining silhouette shows a genuflecting gobbler crouching in the briney cubicle of a nightclub toilet seeking some mystical union between lust, intoxication and sexual adrenalin. For gay men this is everything they could want and more. And it’s not enough.
The Royal Court’s latest experiment involves the placement of the seats. Leo Butler’s new play is set in a yuppie flat in Hackney and the stalls are arranged above the set, around the flat’s walls, so the spectators peer down into the action as if into a building’s foundations. For most of us this created an annoying sense of disengagement, although Friends of the Royal Court experienced it as a Dante-esque pang of voyeuristic schadenfreude. I was seated directly above the loo and as the play started the beautiful Amanda Drew entered, took off her underclothes and emptied her bladder into the lavatory. The accuracy of the sound effects was quite completely charmless. Naturalism is a key aim here. Yawning longueurs, meandering dialogue and lots of nudity but the realism is spoiled by an absolute nut-job of a storyline.
An estranged northern couple (played by Amanda Drew and Con O’Neill), driven apart by huge debts and a hat-trick of aborted pregnancies, make a date in London hoping to have a child. Who will care for it? Dunno. Wasn’t mentioned. Though there’s lots of pain in this play its texture is hard and unwelcoming. Analysing their woes the two middle-aged saddos call up a peculiar hitlist of abstractions to blame: materialism, Thatcherite fiscal policies and the abundance of attractively priced loans. That their bankruptcy might be their fault never occurs to them. Having peeled off their clothes, they make one last stab at progeny but the bloke has a sudden attack of loser’s droop and hastily stomachs two Viagras. When the libido-rush perks him up they attempt to start a family on a sideboard.
The actors’ semi-naked simulation lasted several wall-juddering minutes and we all stared down, with patient interest, as their white buttocks bobbed and slopped together while the garlic-crusher danced a jig on the fake marble top. Clearly the director Clare Lizzimore has sincere objectives here and wants to make a slow, heartfelt statement about ageing, infertility and loss. And she succeeds. But from my crow’s-nest perched high above the toilet-vent I never felt remotely involved in it. ❑
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