Walking to the Burton Taylor Theatre last night around nine pm, I had high hopes. Conversations, the evening’s entertainment, is a new play by Orange Script Productions founder William Heath, part of the Michaelmas Student Season. According to its blurb, the play explores ‘What it means to be queer today’ - as a queer person who loves art on the subject, I was hugely intrigued.
Structured around one man’s days-long interview with a mysterious overhead voice, we follow our protagonist, Tommy, across recollections of the many milestones of childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and straight on through mid-life into old age. Each era of his life is illuminated in a scene, featuring either his best friend, love interest, or mother.
We see the child and adolescent Tommy growing up with a nagging sense of alienation, in part from his dawning realisation of his sexuality, and also because of the absence of his father - a lifelong preoccupation.
Undergrad Tommy - smart, cynical and pedantic - doesn’t believe lasting love is possible between two men. In a hungover conversation with his ‘token straight girl’ best friend Lucy, he laments that ‘women settle - not in a bad way- but they settle down, whereas men are always on to the next new thing’. It’s a scene we’ve all seen a million times before, and the writing here brings no new ideas to the table.
There is an interesting subtext to the way Tommy insists on mistaking limerence for love, presumably a self-protective and self-defeating leftover from his father’s abandonment. But this is dropped far too soon - in the next scene, he has a boyfriend of five years, the sweet but flimsily underwritten Jack, who is proposing to him, and Tommy’s reservations, which boil down to ‘I worry if I let you see all of me, you won’t like what you see’ and a stated outright, then resolved in the space of that short scene.
In the following scene, he’s about to become a father via surrogate, and, absolutely bricking it at the idea, is refusing to join Jack at the hospital. Again, it’s a scene we’ve seen all too often, and the beats of this life - carefree hedonism, long-term relationship, marriage, kids, mid-life crisis - could just as easily be those of a straight main character.
This is not in and of itself a problem, but there is so much fertile ground to explore about how even the most domestic, vanilla homonormative gay lifestyle is still not a straight life. We don’t get any insight into how much tension and internal tightrope-walking go into Jack and Tommy’s interactions with the world or development of the lives they’ve built for themselves, and the show skims over so much potency because of it.
There was also the opportunity for some fascinating parallels between growing up without a paternal role model and growing up without a societal one. Tommy, we are told, was born in 2001. Gay marriage would not have been legalized until he was thirteen years old, which means he - hypothetically - would’ve had a time in his life, when he felt someday, down the line, he’d need to choose between his sexuality and the option of marriage and all the sort of physic privilege tied up in it. I would’ve loved to have been shown those internal battles. Being gay today is still, in its own way, something of a wild west. Queer Gen Z kids have a long line of pioneers to thank for our rights, but there are still no time-tested templates for our lives that we can run with. It’s part of the beauty, and also anxiety, that underpins queer culture.
Perhaps least believably, by the time the show ends, we’re told the year is 2083, yet we’re not shown any suggestions of the changing views around queer culture, love, or family. It begs the question of why the setup, which never fully comes into focus, was necessary at all.
The show instead focuses its lens on the timeless universality of human experience - how a loving parent’s legacy can sustain you long after they are gone, how love is in the little things and ongoing commitment to one another. Throughout the show, there are quippy snippets from interviews with three nameless people, projected onto the back wall of the stage. These three pseudo-pedestrians recount their first dates, crushes, and what love means to them. It’s all very Love Actually.
There are some lovely moments in the show, and its heart is clearly in the right place. It just has too many bells and whistles for what is ultimately a simple and earnest story which, in turn, would hit a lot harder with some extra depth and dimension shaded in. Heath is a canny, warm, and compelling writer whose plotting and dialogue are hampered by clinging hard to cliches. Ultimately, Conversations is not a building I would condemn, but rather one I’d say could be hugely improved via extensive renovation.