Merle Miller, a distinguished mid-century American writer, lived in an actual glass house. When we meet him in this play, he’s a man with an open secret. And he’s about to take to his typewriter and throw some stones.
A gay man in a doggedly straight age, Miller was a liberal journalist and novelist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy years but had never discussed his sexuality. In 1971, provoked by a bullishly homophobic magazine article, he finally broke cover in the New York Times Magazine with What It Means to Be a Homosexual. Later expanded into a book (On Being Different), it is both unsparing memoir and call to action.
In this first show from The Lot Productions, playwright James Corley cleverly unpicks Miller’s landmark essay, remaking an argument into a collage of anecdote and emotion. The lines are searingly memorable – “it’s not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it’s words that break your bones” – but Richard Cant’s superb Merle turns analysis into a churn of fear and fury. A groundbreaking op-ed becomes vital theatre.
Cant has long been a treasure of a character actor, offering brilliant shards on the sidelines – from yodelling goatherd in Cheek By Jowl’s As You Like It to perplexed aristocrat opposite Emma Corrin’s Orlando. As Merle, the gifted sprinter smashes a marathon – a character giddy with contradictions in a solo torrent of text, save for a late challenge from a young gay man (a quivering Cayvan Coates).
In Justin Arienti’s set design, Merle often stands high on a platform. “I personally have no taste for self-revelation,” he announces testily. But in an age of protest, skulking above the fray no longer seems an option. Cant is lanky and haughty, jaw clenched and every sinew taut after a lifetime of slurs – first called sissy at four, aware how friends and colleagues scoff behind his back (“a fag is a homosexual who has just left the room”).
“No revolution has ever been made by the wary or self-pitying,” he concludes. Cant is finally neither, in a stirring piece of theatre asking what it takes to make a person act.
• At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 28 October
