Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel about gay love, grief and alienation is a searing story but one that’s tricky to adapt for the stage. Joycean in spirit, it is set in 1960s California and takes us through a day in the life of a gay middle-aged Englishman, George. This production – lean, inventive but fatally grounded in its action and effects – ends up proving the story’s inherent anti-theatricality.
The book is led by thought, rather than action, and its tone is a mix of the comic, spiritual and melancholic: George’s grief for his dead lover, flaring memories of love, matter-of-fact domestic detail and bathos, all of which give it great underlying emotional power. But here the tone feels flat, stripped to archness and emotionally distant.
Adapted by Simon Reade and directed by Philip Wilson, we see George (Theo Fraser Steele) teach a class of students, have dinner with his friend Charley, take a swim with a student and remember his lover, Jim, all the while, who floats around his home as a persistent ghost. But these parts do not gel into a whole and feel like flimsy vignettes.
They are connected by George’s overarching narrative along with two accompanying figures representing out-of-body observers but this all stalls the drama. Where Tom Ford’s movie adaptation used film-friendly voiceover, here the device simply sounds as if big chunks of the novel are being read aloud, with too little dramatisation in between, certainly in the first half.
Fraser Steele’s tone is amusingly wry but the comic inflections lend his narration an emotionally glazed feel, his occasional tears coming in abrupt starts and stops.
There is plenty of style, just as in Ford’s film: Caitlin Abbott’s set design is clean and gestural; Beth Duke’s sound design evokes images through thrashing waves or toilet flushes.
And Fraser Steele certainly looks the part – a lonely outsider, his smart suit a form of armour – and Isherwood’s observations and arguments offer food for thought. Some drama blooms in a scene between George and Charley (Olivia Darnley, excellent), but none of it brings the intensity and depth of feeling it should.
A Single Man is at Park theatre, London, until 26 November.
