Wednesday, August 14, 2013
The Pride, Trafalgar Studios, review
Alexi Kaye Campbell won a handful of awards for his first play, The Pride, when it opened in 2008, rightly so. It is structurally inventive and deeply felt and, along with Kevin Elyot's My Night with Reg, is one of the best British gay plays I have seen. The director, Jamie Lloyd, clearly admires it, too. He staged the original production at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs. With this excellent revival, once again elegantly designed by Soutra Gilmour, the play should now reach the wider audience it richly deserves.
At the start we might almost be watching a drama by Terence Rattigan. The year is 1958, and Philip and Sylvia, an apparently happily married couple, are entertaining Oliver with drinks in their Pimlico flat before going out to dinner. Oliver writes children's books; Philip is a brisk estate agent, and Sylvia a former actress who is now an illustrator working with Oliver. It's evident that the sensitive, intense Oliver is homosexual, and in a scene that crackles with tension we become aware that the deeply closeted Philip is attracted to him.
And at that point Kaye pulls the rug from under our feet, as the play leaps forward 50 years and a man dressed as a Nazi takes to the stage, engaging in sadomasochistic role-playing games with a character also called Oliver. And then a character called Philip enters the stage and we gather that he is Oliver's recently departed boyfriend who has left because he has tired of his lover's addiction to sex with strangers.
The play skilfully alternates between 1958 and 2008, to suggest how the main characters might have lived in these startlingly contrasted periods, the one all repression and guilt, the other let-it-all-hang-out promiscuity and gay pride.
If that sounds a touch formulaic I can only say that it doesn't feel like it in practice. The play asks hard questions, too. The repression of the Fifties may have been cruel and destructive but is loveless casual sex something to be unequivocally cheered? Is Oliver actually any happier in 2008 than his namesake was in 1958.
But The Pride is far from solemn. Though piercingly painful at times, especially when the Fifties wife confronts her husband's lover and realises that all three of them are as unhappy as each other. Hayley Atwell is superb in this role though her role as Oliver's devoted friend and prop in the modern sections of the play is less rewarding. As Philip, Harry Hadden-Paton beautifully captures the emotional cost of a man ashamed of his true nature, not least during a harrowing scene with an aversion therapist. And Al Weaver is touching and witty as Oliver, desperately lonely in the first section of the play, wildly promiscuous in the second. Meanwhile, Matthew Horne provides three sharply drawn cameos, playing by turn a rent boy, a lad's mag editor, and a psychiatrist, all with aplomb. It's hard to decide which of these three professions is the least appealing.
The play's 1950s scenes strike me as being more original than their 21st-century counterparts, but this is a fine and compassionate drama with a noble breadth and depth of human sympathy.
Until Nov 9. Tickets: 0844 87615; atgtickets.com
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2ff5204a/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctheatre0Ctheatre0Ereviews0C10A2433910CThe0EPride0ETrafalgar0EStudios0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
