This year’s GM Fringe begins, strangely, in a mainstream venue. Manchester’s HOME makes its Theatre Two available for a well-attended performance of Mike Heath’s Faith.
Author Heath holds homophobia up to ridicule in a play which refuses to take the concept seriously. Devout Catholic Faith (Hilly Barber) invites her new acquaintance Melanie (Jenny Jordan-O’Neill) to her home with a view to fixing her up with unmarried son John (Lee Halden). However, John has picked this moment to come out of the closet and not only own up to his true sexuality but to invite Faith to his forthcoming wedding to his partner Sam (Matt Lanigan). Things do not go to plan, and Melanie’s lurid and inaccurate speculations about what is involved in gay sex have consequences which are both tragic and supernatural.
Faith is an uneven play. Mike Heath tries out a number of possible options for staging the play. The opening, with Lee Halden being forcibly undressed, is farcical, Jenny Jordan-O’Neill tries a few malapropisms but does not keep up the habit and there is potential for dark humour with a corpse being concealed. But the author does not settle on a consistent tone.
There is a distinct difference in the atmosphere between the two acts. Ironically, despite playing gay characters, Lee Halden and Matt Lanigan are essentially comedy straight men, their appalled and bemused reactions to the excessive behaviour of the monstrous Melanie serving as substitutes for the audience.
There is a 1970s vibe to the first act in which most of the humour comes from the audience laughing at, rather than with, the ignorance of Melanie as she rattles off offensive, smutty and generally juvenile speculations about the sex lives of gay people. Melanie is a grotesque character and Jenny Jordan-O’Neill clearly has a good time with the role. Humour is the preferred approach throughout the play; Lee Halden’s awkward attempt at poetically explaining his sexual identity to his mother is cringingly embarrassing.
Act two is more conventional, with physical humour arising from supernatural events. There is even an in-joke about how difficult it is to stage such jokes on a limited fringe budget. The approach of mocking the excessive nature of homophobia becomes overt, with the clergy gratefully accepting the revelation that homosexuality is the norm in the afterlife.
Fringe plays often treat subjects such as sexual identity in an over-serious, even dour manner, so the irreverent and silly approach of Faith is a refreshing and welcome change of pace.