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. He deserves a Queen’s Award for Industry. The show is broken up by two-minute pop tunes sung by a half-naked boy band wannabe called Alexis Gerred. You might call that atmosphere. You might call it padding. During these musical numbers, keen eyes will notice tiny wisps of vapour drifting across the stage, apparently emanating from the world’s smallest dry-ice machine, or possibly an off-stage kettle, or somebody blowing hard over a kilo of frozen peas. This heroic attempt at low-budget razzmatazz is the production’s most endearing quality. I should add that you don’t have to be gay to enjoy this show but — as with a visit to a Turkish bath — it can radically alter the experience.
At the same venue, by some miraculous convergence of whatever astral bodies govern the lives of gay men, there’s another out-of-the-closet drama based on real life. Holding the Man is set in Australia and it opens in 1973 with two precocious schoolboys, John and Tim, becoming lovers. When adulthood approaches, their options broaden. John wants to keep their relationship monogamous. Tim agrees. He wants to keep all his relationships monogamous. So they break up, then they ping back together again and their romance follows much the same ups and downs that a heterosexual affair would. Along the way we hear interesting snippets about the technical challenges presented by anal penetration. ‘Pete nibbles my ear, and that distracts me, and before you know it he’s in.’
The Tim–John relationship is charming enough but British audiences may not realise the massive impact the story had in Australia. The memoir on which the play is based is treated like a sacred relic Down Under, where it stands as a parable for Australia’s awakening from bigotry to tolerance during the 1990s. This comes across very forcefully. Aids hit the gay world with gruesome inverted logic, like a shoot-out at a maternity unit or a nail bomb in Santa’s sack. Imagine waking up on your 21st birthday to find you’re 90 years old. That’s what happened to gay men almost as soon as their sexuality had been decriminalised. The freedom and empowerment they’d suddenly achieved were transformed overnight into despair, grief and death. And for Australia, with its overtly macho, hard-drinking, girl-goosing culture, the acceptance of gay lib was more traumatic than it was for us. But what resonates in Australia doesn’t necessarily produce the same vibrations here.
The show’s best asset is Jane Turner (from Kath and Kim), who was friends with the author at school. But her exquisite comic skills are a problem disguised as a blessing. She unwittingly dominates every scene she appears in and her magnetism sometimes upsets the balance of drama. And the play follows a relentlessly downward emotional spiral. Act I is a knockabout comedy, Act II is full of cries and ululations. And the pivotal deathbed scene is slightly less moving than it might be because the expiring victim is represented by a blow-up skeleton. Mind you, I shouldn’t be too harsh on this one. A gay pal I bumped into in the interval (a Brit, not an Aussie) reckoned it was tiptop entertainment.
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