Douglas Hodge, who played drag queen Albin in the Menier’s 2008 production of La Cage Aux Folles, now simultaneously passes on the baton and returns the favour by directing this revival of the 1978-81 triptych by Harvey Fierstein, who later wrote the book for the musical of La Cage and who had created for himself the central role of professional drag queen in search of fulfilment Arnold Beckoff. That role is now taken by David Bedella, best known as Satan in Jerry Springer – The Opera.
    
In the first piece, International Stud, Arnold meets the bisexual Ed but refuses to go back into the closet for him. In Fugue In A Nursery, Arnold and his new boyfriend Alan spend an eventful weekend a year later at the farmhouse of Ed and his lover Laurel. Widows And Children First is set several years later still, with Arnold, now “widowed” of Alan, bringing up a gay teenage foster-son and trying to reconcile himself with his mother.
    
Bedella is exceptionally assured as Arnold, using a gravelly baritone that serves as a working approximation of Fierstein’s own hot-lava basso. As Ed, Joe McFadden is perhaps a little too ready to trade on his more or less inherent gee-whizzery. Sara Kestelman gets some terrific Jewish-mother lines in the earlier part of Mrs Beckoff’s role, but the part then flattens into a more consistently intolerant ogre-figure whose function is simply to be an antagonist for Arnold.
    
Herein lies part of the problem. Not only do the plays portray a different world (pre-AIDS, although scarcely less dangerous, as Alan’s offstage death attests), but they come from a different social and dramatic one. When they were written, any gay drama which crossed into the mainstream was to a significant extent pioneering. Its revival comes in a context which has progressed to the point where the debate about gay marriage is genuinely two-sided, but also one which is more familiar with portrayals of homosexuality … and, in particular, with the cliché that “gay doesn’t mean happy”, that such characters all too often fail in their personal quests, in a kind of repressive dramatic tolerance. So far from Fierstein’s original achievement and however intentionally, to a demanding eye today the work can even seem a little reactionary.

Written for the Financial Times.