This is a new play to launch a new theatre, both of them looking very modern and shiny.
The theatre, which keeps its name, is right next door to the pub where its predecessor was first founded by Dan and Joan Crawford back in 1970 as a dinner theatre in the hostelry’s back room. The main house is now deep underground, while the play is first set in an art gallery many storeys up in a California high-rise.
The play isn’t going to make theatre history. It is no great drama and doesn’t break new ground, but continues the theatre’s recent queer programming and sets out to be a gay romantic comedy.
Despite that setting, Exhibitionists isn’t about artists but named for its characters and the way they present themselves. Writers Shaun McKenna and Andrew Van Sickle, enthusiasts for the comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s, many written by gay men at a time when gay subjects were taboo, say they deliberately borrowed some of their themes but they give them a modern gay perspective. It is easy to see echoes of Coward, for instance, in the way Conor (Ashley D Gayle), a Movieland lawyer, and architect Robbie (Robert Rees), lovers who split up some years ago, unexpectedly bump into each other when visiting an art exhibit (where the works are not paintings but video installations).
Wealthy Conor is now married to Jake Mitchell-Jones’s Mal, a younger Englishman, self-described as a “Twink” whom he can’t keep his hands off; Robbie is with only recently “out” Rayyan (Rolando Montecalvo), who is just waiting for the opportunity to propose to him, though what Robbie wants is an open relationship. Though they are there with their current new loves, old passions are rekindled when they end up in adjoining rooms in a hotel run by Norwegian Sebastian (Øystein Lode), who claims to have nine thousand followers and adds to the mix as a sexually liberated observer.
Though there are underlying themes about monogamous fidelity and promiscuity, gay identity and lifestyle, they tend to be overlaid by camp comedy. There are some lively one-liners and wild confrontations, but no way is it in Coward’s class. There is little sense of the world these men inhabit and not much sense of the people behind the surface emotion. Montecalvo’s sensitive Rayyan gains sympathy and so to some extent does Mitchell-Jones’s neurotic Mal, but the the mechanics of plot take precedence over character and, though played with passion and energy and director Bronagh Lagan keeps the action buzzing, this seems too artificial.
It is a production that teeters on the edge of farce (and Gregor Donnelly’s white-walled setting with its multiple entrances would facilitate that), and its serious side gets submerged. It doesn’t have anything new to say, but some of it is fun and its vitality keeps it going for the 90 minutes that now seems to be the theatre’s target playing time.