The Pride
Royal Court, London
DOES sex change shape over time? In the 1950s, so the story goes, sexual repression kept everyone laced-up and tight-lipped. Then came the 1960s when liberation lit everyone’s fire and freedom let it all hang out. But what about today? Alexi Kaye Campbell’s debut play, The Pride, compares gay sexuality in 1958 and 2008 and implicitly questions this narrative of liberation.
His idea is appealingly symmetrical. The play looks at two love triangles, involving two gay men and a straight woman, in scenes that are 50 years apart but speak to each other with an evocative emotional resonance. In 1958, estate agent Philip and actress-turned-illustrator Sylvia are married, but she suspects that her husband is not all he seems, especially when she introduces him to a colleague from work, the homosexual writer, Oliver.
In 2008, another Philip is walking out on his lover, another Oliver, a journalist who can’t break his habit of having sex with total strangers. Oliver, who is turned on by sado-masochistic fantasies, looks for solace to Sylvia, a straight friend of his, whose own lover, Mario, remains unseen. In both these eras, the longing for love is equated with a search for self-knowledge and the essential loneliness of the human condition is powerfully suggested.
Campbell shows how, in the era of Gay Pride, some of the repressions of the 1950s have been overcome, but only to be replaced by other human attributes – such the compulsion to have anonymous sex – that are equally damaging. The strongest scenes are the one when present-day Philip discovers Oliver with a Nazi-uniformed rent boy and the one when 1950s Philip is given a disgusting aversion-therapy cure for the “disease” of homosexuality.
Although the play’s ideas owe something to French theorist Michel Foucault and its structure borrows the central idea of one of Mark Ravenhill’s more provocative plays (Mother Clap’s Molly House), there is a confidence in its conception that is often beguiling and you feel a passion in the work that makes it memorable. Interestingly for a male writer, the portraits of the two Sylvias are much more appealing that any of the men.
However, although The Pride is full of ideas, Campbell’s writing lacks individuality, and his dialogue is not always convincing, especially in the rather stilted 1950s scenes. And, despite its gestures towards a liberal politics, the play’s images of gay life are oddly old-fashioned. Here, gays are mostly seen as suffering, repressed and miserable. Still, the emotional desperation of the characters is strong enough to drag you through the story.
What saves the play are its flashes of humour and its elements of fantasy, with spooky presences beautifully rendered in director Jamie Lloyd’s careful production. The cast – Bertie Carvel (Oliver), JJ Feild (Philip) and Lyndsey Marshal (Sylvia) – are better in the zesty contemporary scenes than in the clipped and taut 1950s world, while designer Soutra Gilmour’s dreamy set, with its clouded mirror reflecting and refracting images of the audience, brings the stage world into the real one. Since the 1950s, the sexual landscape has undoubtedly changed for the better, but human beings’ capacity for sexual misery remains something of a constant.
Aleks Sierz
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