Once upon a time curtains nightly rose on West End plays set in posh drawing rooms. You could expect some mild sexual skirmishing, regular trips to the drinks trolley and a comforting glow of audience recognition. Something similar happens in Jonathan Hall's Flamingos at the Bush; the key difference is that the action takes place, as it never would have done in the 1950s, in a gay B&B in Blackpool.
Hall's five characters are carefully chosen to embody different aspects of gay life. Cliff, the ageing establishment owner, pines nostalgically for the old days of sexual furtiveness and discretion. Among his weekend visitors, estate agent Mark selfishly exploits his quasi-open relationship with gentle geography teacher Phil. Gavin is a flighty Halifax civil servant who relishes his promiscuous freedom. And software expert Richard, apparently escaping for the first time from his long-term lover, shyly ventures into the clubs and acts as a catalyst among the boarding house regulars.
Undeniably, Hall's play is humane and well-observed. He creates one particularly good character in Phil, a self-confessed anorak who fusses over the weather reports, and accurately charts the inequality of supposedly open relationships in which one partner always has a much better time than the other. I just wish, both structurally and thematically, he took a few more risks. Like the Blackpool trams, his plot proceeds along predictable lines in which the outsider, Richard, stirs up unsuspected passions in his fellow guests. And far from showing, as his programme note suggests, the confusing number of lifestyle options available to gay men, Hall's play curiously replicates the dilemmas of the straight world: his characters agonise over the merits of freedom against attachment, the unfairness of marriage, the difficulty of choosing a holiday and rising house prices in the north of England.
Although cast in a traditional mould, the play is well performed under Mike Bradwell's direction. Mike Grady, who has the pouchy features and slight scruffiness of the middle-aged Auden, is outstanding as the dogged geography teacher and there is good, unshowy support from Ian Reddington as his errant partner and from Fred Pearson as the sedate, motherly hotelier. I don't doubt the accuracy of Hall's portrait but, like the small Blackpool hotel in which the action is mostly set, the play gives off an air of cosy familiarity.
Until April 14. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
