Voices of reason

To Be Straight With You
Lyttelton

American Briefs
Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1

This is one of the sorriest aspects of the problem. What inspires gay repression is sexual confusion. Kill off a gay man in the hope of killing off your gay self. Some of the hatred is less Freudian and arises from a thoughtless adherence to traditional practices, a sort of mob-rule of the mind. A Muslim teenager from Hull begins his tale by reporting that his unhappy mum has taken to drinking vodka ‘under the stairs’. He joins her down there and it’s a very happy little cubby-hole until he reveals his sexuality. Mum is too sozzled to care but Dad is incandescent, banishes the boy from the house and later stabs him. What’s astonishing is the understanding, the amused nonchalance with which the kid treats his father’s reaction. The entire anecdote is told by a sublime athlete, Ankur Bahl, who skips around the stage with amazing speed and agility as he relates his tale. The silver twine of the rope whirrs almost invisibly as he bobs and prances, and the effortless brilliance of his skipping, his acrobatic frivolity, becomes an emblem for his triumphant good humour, his attachment to essential human virtues, his indestructible happiness. That sounds terribly twee but this is an ovation-prompting performance. Newson’s show, with its small cast and collapsible sets, has a nomadic heart and has just completed a world tour. It deserves a second and if it rocks up near you give it a look.

To launch a new fringe venue in the middle of a stock-market crash is to display a contempt for fiscal rectitude that borders on the poetic. Above the Stag is a blackbox theatre berthed in a Dickensian back-street in Victoria and its baptismal show features ten playlets by gay American writers. Some of the material is patchy but one of these pieces is a riveting short drama. The Black Eye by Jim Dalglish follows an ageing cruiser whose indulgence in every variety of sexual pleasure has sated his libido to the point of expiry. A chance encounter with a straight youngster tempts him to try out a new thrill, the conversion-seduction, but at the critical moment he deliberately sabotages his own efforts, knowing that even this novel excitement will leave him dissatisfied. The play has the feel of lived experience intelligently analysed and transfused with marvellous clarity into a dramatic lament on the perils of sexual anhedonia. This is a universal human topic which has provoked comment from three of the last century’s foremost sages. Beckett: ‘Habit is a great deadener.’ Stoppard: ‘What free love is free of is love.’ Lemmy: ‘If you get hit on the skull with a hammer at 7 every morning you eventually get used to it.’