Johnathan Harvey's 1993 comedy does feel like it's every gay directors first play - or at least it's shown up on a lot of gay directors resumes since then. It's a gentle love story between two 15 year old boys on a South London housing estate, and given the gentle sense of humour and the working class background it plays slightly as a queer Willy Russell play. At the time it premiered it was already one of the gentler queer plays around - Angels in America was being put together in the same period, and Mark Ravenhill's far more confrontational "Shopping and F**king" was two years away, and at the time I admit I was looking for more of the raw rough-edged stuff rather than something this gentle.
But nearly 30 years on, it's time for me to catch up with a play I've missed from my canon. It's funny and sweet, a little messy here and there (it almost feels like Harvey isn't quite sure what to do with two of the straight characters, as he sends one off on a drug-fuelled trip and exiles another offstage), and it's clearly pushing the rougher edges of the love story offstage (the homophobic dad of Ste is only ever a voice offstage), but where it counts - the gentle arrival of a romance into the lives of two boys who weren't expecting it, and the impact on the people around them - it plays true and honest.
In this production it gets a solid presentation - Will Manton as non-sporty Jamie and Bayley Prendergast as the more rough-and-tumble Ste have a natural chemistry and it's a delight to see them edging their way together in act one and working out what their relationship means in act two. Julia Kennedy Scott as Jamie's mum is a rough-edged delight, blunt and direct but with the heart in the right place. Hannah Zaslawski suffers a bit from the script's lack of clarity on why Leah's in the story - her function appears to be so that Jamie has someone to talk to before Ste comes along, but her goofy climactic appearance doesn't really work and feels more like a lot of dramatic noise covering up a lack of character development rather than a set of personality quirks. Caspar Hardaker has a character where the script isn't sure whether he should be mocked or taken seriously, and his performance falls on the side of mocking in ways that feel weird and make him a bit more superfluous than he should be.
Some clever design decisions in David Marshall-Martin's set mean that scenes flow easily into one another, and the and the production feels coherent and sweet all round.
In short this is a reasonable production of a nice but not-entirely-essential play.
No comments:
Post a Comment