Male bonding

Both these plays are about concealed sexuality. Straight, by D.C. Moore, is based on an American indie flick named Humpday. The play has one of the funniest openings you’ll ever see. We’re in a flat occupied by suburban nonentity Lewis and his wife Morgan. Lewis’s old college mucker, Waldorf, has come home after seven years in Mongolia and he cheekily decides to announce his return to western civilisation by inserting his unsheathed tumescence through the letterbox. Lewis doesn’t see it. His wife does and she has to persuade him that she isn’t hallucinating. The gate-crashing phallus symbolises the play’s theme of male eroticism thrusting itself uninvited into soporific domesticity.

Waldorf’s travels have loosened his inhibitions but intensified his competitive urges. After a night of booze and sexual dares, the two men agree to hire a hotel room and make a gay porn film starring themselves. Lewis then has to explain to his wife that homoerotic movie-making is a relatively normal activity for two Varsity chums. All this is done with great levity and brio under the assured direction of Richard Wilson.

In the second act, the two terrified idiots try to talk themselves into, and out of, the act of congress neither of them is committed to. The script has fewer surprises to deliver here, but it maintains its deft comic touch. The second half will certainly delight those sexual analysists who support the Boy George theory that all straight men are secretly gay and that every heterosexual act is a laughably crude displacement activity that divides the doer from his true self. Philip McGinley, as Waldorf, delivers a sensational starring performance. In his last notable stage role he played a Glaswegian rent boy selling kinky phone sex to millionaire oddballs of the Jimmy Savile persuasion.