Kevin Elyot’s first play is a snapshot of the brief window between the decriminalisation of homosexuality across the whole of the UK in 1982 and the full emergence of the Aids crisis.
It’s a baggy, beginner’s piece — Elyot had previously been an actor with pioneering troupe Gay Sweatshop — that contains elements of his later hit My Night With Reg. Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s revival, which originated at the King’s Head, brings out the better moments in the writing and hurries over the flaws.
Lee Knight’s Tony is — groan — a wannabe writer, living in squalor in Kentish Town with his lover, American academic Greg (the wonderfully named Stanton Plummer-Cambridge). Both enjoy one-night stands on the side, but not on the scale enjoyed by their camp friend William (Elliot Hadley), who sees London as an all-you-can-eat sausage buffet.
Tony decides to hire a cleaner in the shape of fit young Robert (Jonah Rzeskiewicz) who is — double groan — an unemployed actor. You can see the major plot development coming a mile off, but Elyot uses it to explore the boundaries of intimacy in a community newly out and proud, but still under threat of abuse and queerbashing.
The four men are not so much characters as archetypes of different romantic and sexual preferences. But newcomer Rzeskiewicz impresses as Robert (he also has the lion’s share of the onstage nudity) and Hadley debunks the prevailing air of petulant stiffness as flirty, twittery William. Elyot’s writing is pacey and serves as a time capsule for early-80s London, when the gay cruising scene was burgeoning, everyone smoked and 90p was an outrageous price to pay for a pint.
Amanda Mascarenhas’s set is overly grubby, though — it really bugged me that Robert never picked up a crumpled tissue — and cramped. This lends an unnecessarily oppressive air to a play that’s actually all about liberation and making choices.
Until Feb 1
