Actor Alexi Kaye Campbell’s first
produced work as a playwright shows thought and sensitivity in telling
parallel stories of a gay couple in 1958 and in 2008, but I’m afraid
that at a number of moments it overdoes things just that tiny but fatal
amount which tips matters into ridiculousness.
Certainly, the opening 1958 scene is meant to be stilted, as an
indicator both of the era and of the subliminal signals which
children’s author Oliver and his illustrator’s husband Philip pick up
from each other; and actors and director Jamie Lloyd have thought
seriously about period pronunciation. Nevertheless, much of the two
men’s early exchanges sound reminiscent of comedian Harry Enfield’s
antiquated information-film character Mr Cholmondeley-Warner. Just
after the interval, when the 2008 journalist version of Oliver is
meeting with the straight editor of a new gay-targeted magazine, the
latter is given quite an affecting recollection of the death from AIDS
of an uncle, but it drowns beneath a tsunami of uncomprehending “gay is
cool” banality – again, intended to position the character, but way too
much to be plausible.
Bertie Carvel is excellent as Oliver, unable in 1958 to give up on a
married man and unable in 2008 to reconcile a deep love for his
just-departed ex with his own compulsion for casual encounters that
broke the relationship. Carvel is at his most eloquent when
failing to say something: his mouth
and face work in discreet spasm, and somehow suggest both what the
words would have been and their reception. As Philip, J.J. Feild has
one excellent scene towards the end, volunteering to undergo a
primitive form of aversion therapy to “cure” him, he hopes, of his love
for Oliver more than his sexual desires. His 2008 incarnation, in
contrast, never comes into focus. Lyndsey Marshal as Sylvia also has a
better time of it in 1958 as Philip’s wife than in 2008 as Oliver’s
overwritten fag-hag friend (and the occasion moreover of some OTT
drunk-acting). The staging slips fluidly between periods as it plays in
front of Soutra Gilmour’s huge looking-glass of a set, but in the end
the Fifties strand is over-articulated and the Noughties narrative
doesn’t really tell us much at all except that things have changed a
modicum in 50 years.
Written for the Financial
Times.