Alex and Obi decide to get married. Obi’s parents, especially his churchgoing Nigerian-British father, have always been uncomfortable about his homosexuality, and he is unpractised at talking about his experiences or feelings. Alex’s parents, by contrast, have always been supportive, shading – in the case of his mother (in order to generate a pleasing asymmetry) – into a desire to control him, in over-reaction to his former cocaine addiction about which, like everything else, he is quite open. You can list the ingredients yourself: the in-laws’ dinner from hell... each partner growing unsure of the other... Alex being left alone with a line of coke (cue portentous guitar sting... no, really)... a moment of truth consisting of a series of intercut duologues when it seems that every couple onstage, straight or gay, is about to sunder for good... And is there a contrived, implausible happy ending? No spoilers; you’ll have to draw your own inferences.

It is, in short, a bog-standard awkward-engagement story, differing from a thousand others only in that both principal parties are guys. This factor, contrary to co-writer Matt Jones’ programme note, does not turn a hackneyed story into a radical one. Obviously it’s only to be welcomed that we’ve advanced so far that such a story centring on a gay couple can be unexceptional. Really, though, “unexceptional” is not one of the top hundred adjectives you’d want attached to your stage production.

But it’s just so accurate. Robby Graham’s direction is big on Frantic Assembly-style but frankly journeyman movement sequences (although I did like a sequence in which Alex reels, zonked, on a bungee rope). The score by Kele Okereke of Bloc Party is... persistent. It mixes African rhythms with electronica and, I’m afraid, pedestrian (usually unrhymed) lyrics which baldly state the singer’s feeling without taking figurative flight; it’s almost as if the only reason for setting these remarks to music were to enable them to be repeated several times.

I also feel a little defrauded by that title. The catalyst for the marriage is to grant Alex legal residency status once his company relocates, but this simply has no bearing at all upon the story that unfolds. The best one can say is that it provides a limp pun on the boy-loses-boy/boy-gets-boy-back (damn, spoilers after all) narrative. Obi’s father speaks time and again of the old country without the writers making the slightest connection with current events either on- or offstage. At this moment in British political history (I’m thinking here about migration in general, not the Brexit specifics which could have added another dimension to the title), ignoring the wider picture is pretty culpable; all but entirely ignoring the immediate story that you’ve introduced yourselves into the bargain shows a real lack of joined-up thinking.

The most constructive thing I can say is that the piece would surely feel more at home in a cosier, funkier space than the 550-seat, proscenium-arch Lyric Hammersmith. I acknowledge that I seemed in a tiny minority of the press-night audience in not loving it, and reiterate that its weaknesses have nothing to do with the gay dimension, but are if anything in spite of it. But really, in every significant respect we’ve seen this all before.

Written for the Financial Times.