The Boys in the Band
★★★★☆ Engaging
Bedlam: Wed 23 – Sat 26 Oct 2024
Review by Thom Dibdin
The EUTC’s engaging production of Mart Crowley’s 1968, New York-set gay drama, The Boys in the Band, is a well-observed affair which is at its best when it goes past the play’s innate waspishness to find its inner anger.
It’s not all as satisfying, however, with the company under co-directors Elle Willcocks and Aaron de Verés not always up to the task they have set themselves by using a thrust staging in the intimate Bedlam space. But they create a production which is both of its time, and which has resonances over half a century later.
Ewan Little and Oscar Bryan in The Boys in the Band. Pic: EUTC
Crowley’s play pivots around Michael, here played with an increasing depth by James Cumming, who is hosting a birthday party in his Upper East Side apartment for his friend Howard, who is as late to his own party as he always is.
The handful of other guests form something of a cross section of gay life in the late Sixties, when the sexual revolution was in full swing but Stonewall had yet to burst into riot and AIDS was a complete unknown.
Ewan Little brings a naivity and charm to Michael’s younger partner, Donald, who drives up from his parents to New York every Saturday to see his therapist and spend the evening before driving home. Little carries off the charisma which Michael might wish he still had, and provides a foil to his most outrageous comments.
flamboyant
Noah Sarvesvaran is confidently flamboyant as Latino queen, Emory. Perhaps not quite carrying off the character’s age, but certainly creating a strong and believable character. Like many over the top people, he carries a frailty behind his facade and show.
A scene from The Boys in the Band. Pic EUTC
Kikelomo Hassan is not quite as clear cut as the younger black queen, Bernard. In what is a very wordy piece, co-directors Willcocks and de Verés have clearly focussed on their actor’s big soliloquies and strong moments – without working as hard on the ensemble and its blocking or, indeed, ensuring that they perform for the audience, not to each other.
Hassan suffers more than most in this count. Her big second act moment when Bernard stands up to Michael’s offhand racism towards Emory is gutsy and from the heart, opening up some of the fractured nature of the gay community that, in real life, would spill out at Stonewall a year later.
Her early interjections into the ebb and flow of the chat and back-chat do tend to get lost, however. And her crucial participation in Michael’s cruel game, where the party guests have to phone someone they have loved and tell them, is also not as distinct as it might be.
real understanding
Dylan Kaeuper and Zac Williams play the clearest-cut couple of the piece: recently divorced Hank and promiscuous Larry. They succeed in teasing out the issues of their own relationship over the course of the play. Their imbalance is clear from the start and explored with a real understanding of human nature.
Dylan Kaeuper and Rufus Goodman in The Boys in the Band. Pic: EUTC
Dropped into the Michael and Howard’s usual circle are a pair of completely opposite disruptive elements.
Ewan Guthrie is a young street hustler, Cowboy, procured by Emory as a birthday present for Howard. Without going over the top, Guthrie plays him as a gauche young man, somewhat at sea with all the sniping going on around him and never quite getting the underlying drift of it all.
The other, seemingly random addition, is Alan McCarthy. Michael’s straight room mate from college – now married and a successful businessman – who Rufus Goodman gives a cleverly complex gloss to. Homophobia masking something other which Michael, in all his pushy narcissism is clearly intent on exploring but only succeeds in driving even deeper.
dynamics
The first act successfully explores the dynamics of the group but somehow feels under driven. There is no such issue as the company return for the second half and the arrival of Oscar Bryan as Harold: self-deprecating to a fault, bitchy as hell and intensely manicured.
Zac Williams and Ewan Guthrie in The Boys in the Band. Pic: EUTC.
Bryan brings a little stardust to the role: clear, even when quiet, delivering Harold’s most outre observations with panache. Harold might be the nominal centre of attention, but while maintaining that pretence, Bryan allows the real action to ebb and flow around him as Michael insists on playing a dangerous game of telephone love declarations.
Overall, despite the difficulties of blocking in the thrust stage, this is very well done. There are seriously tricky issues here – and while its original audiences might have balked at the depictions of gay life, it is Michael’s racism towards non-white Emory and Bernard, and Jewish Harold, that really make you wince.
To the company’s credit, they have not attempted to bowdlerise the script, which would certainly have diminished its force. And while a few lines of what is said on stage would be unacceptable today, they are skilfully handled in the context. The play’s brief explosion into violence is also both believable and skilfully directed by Rebecca Mahar.
quibble
If the staging it tricky, the set design works particularly well, for the most part allowing the company to come in and out of focus as necessary. Grace Read and Kiran Mukherjee’s lighting really enhances the whole, pulling focus into small areas and giving crips outline to specific flashpoints,
Older audience members might quibble at the handling of the old phones which are crucial to the plot, but such things as on-stage smoking and increasing inebriation are well done.
This is an intelligent production of a ground-breaking play which while it helped the cause of gay liberation, is essentially a great piece of entertainment.
Running time: Two hours and 20 minutes (including one interval)
Bedlam Theatre, 11B Bristo Place, EH1 1EZ.
Wed 23 – Sat 26 October 2024.
Evenings: 7.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
The Boys in the Band. Pic EUTC.
ENDS
