YOUNG, CONFLICTED AND GAY: VOICES FROM 1968
It feels dated now: the shrieking queenery, the preening Jules-and Sandy camp, the insider camaraderie. Oh and the angs: the misery of self-hating defiance. Young gay men today, especially from outside the bubble of modern metropolitan ease, may recognize some of it but for many, it will provoke not nostalgia but a shiver.
Matt Crowley’s 1968 play about a group of gay New Yorkers at a birthday party turned sour was revolutionary in its day, showing this coterie of young – and not-so-young – men in a network of friendship , love and conflicted feelings in the years before the first US gay pride marches and well before the spectre of AIDS both devastated and strengthened their community. Its very datedness makes it worth reviving. We need to acknowledge the continuing legacies of what social attitudes did to gay people.
It is also fascinating in the way Crowley tracks the spectrum of the men’s different characters and feelings from glorious (very entertaining) flippancy to despair. The widest trajectory is by Ian Hallard as Michael the host, preparing to celebrate the birthday of the acerbic Harold (Mark Gatiss, who appears towards the end of the first act). His friend Donald (Daniel Boys) is in therapy; Hank and Larry are a couple, and from a slightly older generation James Holmes as Emory in appalling shorts gives it all the extreme limp-wristed screaming-queen-cum-den-mother action we had half forgotten in the age of normalization.
The catalyst is Michael’s old roomate Alan, who turns up having had (we presume) a bust-up with his wife. The anxiety of Michael about this judgmental straight turning up at his party mounts, justifiably; Harold arrives late, a saturnine elder who they all regard with a certain nervous respect, and he is presented with a ridiculous dim bare-chested hunk in a cowboy hat as his “present” (Jack Derges is very funny in the part).
And so it collapses – two fight-directors are credited in Adam Penford’s production – and Michael’s fragility is exposed. The figure of Harold – Gatiss deploying a menacing, amused stillness seated upstage – is a mixture of cruelty and the harsh wisdom of resignation. When he rounds on Michael with a flat “You are a homosexual and you don’t want to be” it is harsh, but feels somehow necessary. And when Michael says in despair “If we could just not hate ourselves!” that cry from the past should crack open the hardest, nastiest, most intolerant heart.
box office 0845 505 8500 http://www.vaudevilletheatre.com to 18 Feb
rating four 
theatreCat 