Jonathan Harvey’s well-shaped and sharply-written play has been around for a couple of decades and has lost none of its edge during that time.
The issues are homosexuality, its difficulties and its excitements as it shapes the lives of two teenage schoolboys drawn to each other by something greater than they can control.
Jamie ( the very fine Sam Jackson ) lives with his blowzy, good-natured mother Sandra (the excellent Charlie Brooks) on a run-down London housing estate. Jamie falls in love with Ste ( Thomas Law) who takes longer to come to terms with his acceptance that he is gay, and seems to believe that the problem in Jamie’s case can be resolved by a kick-about with a football.
What this particular scene makes clear is that no psychological adjustment is necessary – at least not for Jamie, for whom loving Ste is a natural extension of his feelings.
The later scene where Ste wakes up to his true nature, is played with a delicacy which is the hallmark of this fine production where colourful language should never blind us to the fact that these deeply touching people are seeking a reason for their existence in socially limited circumstances where money is as short as morals and gay prejudice is still outside, lying in wait for the unwary.
The terms “gay”, “queer” and more unprintable words are thrown at Jamie, yet even at 15 he has the courage to throw them off and accepts who he is.
But the play, directed with admirable stylishness by Nikolai Foster, has a constant ripple of comedy running through it, and this gives the inter-relationship between the characters a wiry, elastic toughness which has little sentimentality about it, but a great deal of resilience to the tacky deal life has dished out to them.
Vanessa Babirye is very good as the young Leah, obsessed with the singer Momma Cass and Charlie Brooks is superb as she flaunts her past lovers.
Finally she accepts her son’s right to his own sexuality and compromises with his necessary emergence into a painful world (for him, at least) a world still-and willfully, you feel, without comprehension.
Runs until April 11, 2015
