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Conservative mores

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

Tory Boyz
Soho

Sick Room
Soho

The Pretender Agenda
New Players

The Conservatives were once a party of proud Etonians and closet homosexuals; now they’re a party of closet Etonians and proud homosexuals. This is the background to Tory Boyz, a new play by James Graham for the National Youth Theatre which examines the shifting attitudes of the Tory high command to gays within their ranks. Clumsily arranged, the play opens with the age-old question about Ted Heath and then shifts to a group of ambitious researchers whose only connection with Heath is that they work in his old office. Scroll back a few decades and we’re shown young Ted as a predictably tortured soul, picking at the piano, doting on his mother, rejecting the advances of gorgeous blondes and methodically suppressing his instincts in the pursuit of his career. But what instincts, exactly? Keeping his proclivities secret was the only thing Heath ever managed competently. He left no clues or witnesses, no kiss-and-tell guardsmen spilling the beans about spilling the beans. The play skirts turgidly around the issue, revealing nothing because there’s nothing to reveal.

But as soon as it fast-forwards to the present day, it acquires vibrancy and self-confidence. We watch Sam, a gay working-class Tory as he clashes with his boss, Nick, a smug Home Counties homophobe. Sam harbours ambitions to instruct teenagers in the intricacies of the democratic system and he initiates a role-play scheme at a local comp where the kids form a ‘Cabinet’ and appoint each other to the great offices of state. The results are chaotically comic. ‘Point of order, sir. Is it OK for the Home Secretary to tell the Prime Minister to f*** off?’ We flit several times between the school-room slapstick and the researchers’ office where Nick and Sam spar and tussle.

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