Harmless fun

Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho
Trafalgar Studio 2, until 22 May

Holding the Man
Trafalgar Studio 1, until 3 July

Blogs and blogging, bloggers and bloggery. What’s it all about? At first sight blogomania looks like an entirely new literary form. A second glance reveals that it’s the oldest genre of the lot: oral history. A few years back, Clayton Littlewood opened a menswear shop in Soho and when business was slow he amused himself by writing an internet journal about the loafers and oddballs who popped in for a cigarette and a moan. Blog became book. Book became play. The material is rather like the novelty jockstraps Littlewood sells to passing woofters: it’s harmless fun and there’s not much of it.

The characters preen and mince in predictable fashion. Their costumes — blazer, crimped hair, silk neckerchief — are as dated as their ‘omey palomey’ dialect. Some of the one-liners would make the final draft of an Orton farce. Angela teeters through the door in a pair of pink heels shortly after her sex-change operation. ‘I feel like a bona fide women at last. I woke up this morning with a full-blown case of thrush.’ An ageing mincer named Lesley finds dining at The Stockpot intolerable. He takes his seat, treads on a cockroach, scrapes it off his heel, checks the waiter’s fingernails for dirt and announces, ‘It’s like eating in a benefits office.’

Phil Willmot’s ramshackle direction is informal almost to the point of disintegration but the show’s good-natured warmth comes across despite the junk-shop furnishings and last-minute set. The division of labour is rather off-kilter. Littlewood narrates the show. David Benson, a great talent, shoulders the task of impersonating every gay character in the script, and he does this with huge energy and panache.