Outlaws to In-laws

An evening dedicated to the highs and lows of gay history, Outlaws to In-Laws takes a look at how men have interacted with one another over the past seven decades. Spanning from the Fifties to the present day, these seven short plays by seven different writers explore the choices that were made during times of prejudice and intolerance.

Director Mary Franklin draws high-standard performances, with each cast member creating clear distinctions between each character. Within minutes an actor will effectively transform from playing a physically abusive homophobe to a shy, closeted young male, and it is impressive to see so many bold choices.

Representing seven stories and 20 characters, with six actors on one stage, is a definite challenge, but the cast work well together to ensure it never feels confusing. The only drawback to some of the softer speech as a character choice is that the fan in the King's Head is so loud that dialogue can become inaudible.

Some of the most exciting drama of the evening comes in the second play, Mister Tuesday written by Jonathan Harvey. This two hander starring Elliot Balchin and Jack Bence is a voyeuristic look into the life of a closeted husband and father of two, soon to be three, who seeks out pleasure in public bathrooms.

Balchin and Bence's relationship is unhealthy to say the least, and as the pair's goading of one another gets increasingly heightened, their secret affair is threatened by exposure. Both actors effectively demonstrate the seriousness of their situation, and work together to create an atmosphere of the utmost intensity.

It is a hard task to design a stage that can effectively make seven different time periods believable, but PJ McEvoy does well to do just that. As each new scene emerges, so do new parts of the set that have been cleverly hidden away. However, Mcevoy's design can be restrictive, with doors are placed in a position where they hinder audience's sightlines for the majority of the evening.

This series of short plays holds nothing back, and attempts to tackle every possible issue that gay men could have faced. Violence, drug use, male escorting, same-sex marriage, and sleaze - nothing is off-limits. It presents a problem, as the audience is given a broad and basic overview of issues, lacking any deeper insight.

This is the disadvantage of having so many plays crammed into one evening. They're all very good, but we want to know more. Whilst it is exciting to leave viewers inquisitive, it is frustrating at the same time. There is a somewhat chronological parallel between the plays, but even with that it still feels like there is something missing.

Nevertheless, it's a powerful, important look at queer history, and this evening is a political statement. It's a reminder of how far gay men have come in their battle for equality, but also places a clear emphasis on all the work that's still to be done.

Despite the evening being so rooted in history, it never feels overwhelming, and if audiences do not want to engage in the politics, then they can simply sit back and enjoy the campiness, light-hearted humour and the spectacle. Looking around the room you see a representation of many queer identities, and it's great that this event provides something for everybody to take away from it.

Alistair Wilkinson

Outlaws to In-Laws is a major achievement and deserves not only a long run here in London but much wider circulation in theatres across the land, where the social climate is still perhaps less accepting. This is the kind of theatre that has the capacity to inspire and change lives here and now, as well as remind us of a shared, if often traumatic, past.

Most of the time it is not hard for a reviewer to place a scrim of distance between himself and the subject matter up for commentary. There are occasions, however, when a combination of common references from your own life floats past like a continual sequence of distracting cultural debris triggering little bursts of memory often at emotional variance to the tone of what you are viewing. This was my truth, and that of many in the audience, during a sequence of seven short new plays devoted to the last seventy years of the experience of gay men in England.

Each of these plays gave a different slice of felt gay male life, starting with the Coronation year of 1953, and then on to 1965, 1977, 1984, 1997, 2004 & finally 2017. There are twenty characters in all, played by six actors, on a minimalist but more than adequate set, continually rearranged by the actors during brief black-outs. There are plenty of thematic links and some references to characters across the plays. There is even a ring, a ‘McGuffin’ that transfers from character to character ending up as the ring to seal a wedding in the final play. Director Mary Franklin, has tied together what plausibly can be, but left each of the segments to speak for themselves too.

Clearly the overall transition described here is one from exclusion to acceptance, but it is no easy progressive parable by any means. Many other issues, whether of race or class or social inequality get caught up in the narratives, and many new problems and tensions emerge even though, or perhaps even because, the legal framework for gay life becomes more accommodating. Some of the best and most poignant moments revolve around the betrayals and acts of self-hatred that an era of repression, as much as oppression, can create.

The first play ‘Happy & Glorious’, by Philip Meeks, is set in a building that overlooks Westminster Abbey. There is a lot of brittle chat in the manner of Rattigan and Coward, a wonderful bravura drag impersonation of the late Queen Mary by Paul Carroll, and a stand-off between the case for conformity and self-assertion, that seems a little too contrived. The piece as a whole seemed under-rehearsed in comparison with the other contributions and the cast less at home and comfortable with the period style.

‘Mr Tuesday’ is Jonathan Harvey’s contribution to the medley, set in 1965 on the cusp of decriminalisation. This is an exquisitely written piece suffused with the bruised tenderness and anguished choices we are familiar with from elsewhere in his work. Here love curdles into blackmail, and the victim turns the tables on his conflicted lover but loses his sense of self-worth and integrity at the same time. Jack Bence is absolutely to the pitch of the apparently powerless but ultimately resourceful young man of the title, but Elliot Balchin is less convincingly authentic as the policeman who cannot reconcile his own inner and outer contradictions.

‘Reward’ by Jonathan Kemp is a fine piece of sustained writing that captures the splashy, contradictory, emotionally raw, sprawling disconnects of the late-1970s with real power. It is the story of an unlikely affair born of a bus-stop meeting between Spike (Jack Bence), a skin-head who may be a member of the National Front, and Donald (Michael Duke), a young black, middle-class student. The growth of their intimacy is exquisitely charted in physical and emotional terms of a convincingly authentic awkwardness: the moment when Donald first strokes Spike’s shaved head is breath-catching, and the treatment of Spike’s illiteracy is very moving too. Thuggish violence from Paul Carroll’s Terry is all the more unsettling for being non-literal: all in all there was a larger play waiting to emerge from this deftly sketched outline.

We are at the Tory Party conference in Patrick Wilde’s ‘1984’. Alex Marlow’s Tommy and Elliot Balchin’s Alan are at odds over the question of how far one should tell truth to power. This is a fair enough rehearsal of the some of the core arguments of the decade, though the relationships at the centre of it are only lightly delineated and the character of Peter, a vagrant/mugger, seems a mere device. Melodrama beckons at the end.

With press night falling on the exact twentieth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana it seemed all the more appropriate that ‘Princess Die’ by Matt Harris focused on the experiences of Di-impersonator, Shane, (Alex Marlow). This was a powerful exploration of how both fragility and tough survival instincts can co-exist, with AIDS, an underwear model and basic questions of fidelity all thrown into the mix. Marlow’s brittle central performance held it all together memorably.

Perhaps the finest piece of naturalistic writing across the whole evening was ‘Brothas 2’ by Topher Campbell. Taking us back to the early days of internet dating, we got to know ripped, swaggering Dwayne (Michael Duke) and his overweight chum Femi (Myles Devontè) as they knocked back booze and flirted with online contacts (whose profiles and texts we saw projected backstage). This was witty, free-wheeling, writing that the two players exploited to the full, reserving a neat twist for the final moments.

‘The Last Gay Play’ by Joshua Val Martin was a strange confection with which to end the sequence: appropriate on one level, in that it took us right up to the present day and the pros and cons of marriage as an institution; but less convincing an ending than it might have been because of the thin characterisation of couple at the centre of events and the displacement of focus onto the priest and father of one of them – another fine performance by Paul Carroll. The emotional core of this playlet revolved around the father-son relationship. It would probably have been better to focus on that rather than bring in other themes as well.

This evening, like a cabaret sequence, is inevitably uneven in quality and tone, but the many fine performances and the useful attempts to integrate what can be given continuity make for a continually absorbing meditation on how the lives of gay men in metropolitan England have changed and remained the same in the last seventy years.

Outlaws to In-Laws is a major achievement and deserves not only a long run here in London but much wider circulation in theatres across the land, where the social climate is still perhaps less accepting. This is the kind of theatre that has the capacity to inspire and change lives here and now, as well as remind us of a shared, if often traumatic, past.

Tim Hochstrasser

Gays were invented in 1952, according to this collection of short plays that looks at homosexuality in the seven decades since. Starting from the Queen’s coronation and ending at a gay marriage in 2017, the seven plays compiled in the ‘Outlaws to In-Laws’ range in time and in quality, but not particularly in tone. 

Although there are some good writers involved, such as ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ creator Jonathan Harvey, the collection suffers from two major problems: a lack of imagination in the way the stories are told, and the frustrating fact that, at 20 minutes each, there is so little space to tell them. It just isn’t enough to get under the skin of any issue the plays raise – Section 28, race, AIDS, prostitution, religion and class. The format almost works against what the evening is trying to do. 

Still, each piece has its moments, helped by a versatile six-strong cast. Paul Carroll gives a big, bitter performance as a drag queen in 1952. And in 1964, Peter, played by Jack Bence, suggests that the best an openly gay couple can be is ‘not a freak show’. Bence, in fact, is the best thing about this. He plays someone completely different in each play, from a reformed National Front member to a desperate thief, made homeless after being diagnosed HIV positive, intensely physical each time and shedding his skin for each new scene.

Matt Harris’s 1997-set play ‘Princess Die’, which sees Alex Marlow as a Diana impersonator hallucinating a Calvin Klein model into life, finds a fresh way to tell its story. The rest of the evening is a bit one-note, and it’s so frustrating because there are some mighty stories to tell buried in here.

The evening, directed by Mary Franklin, is sad and sombre, and its tender moments are muted. That’s partly to do with the depressing history of being gay in this country – and it is powerful to have so much awful British social history presented in one evening, condensed and telescoped – but partly it’s to do with the sameyness of the plays.

Tim Bano

Seven short plays by writers including Jonathan Harvey chart the turbulent trip down the aisle for gay men in the UK. Spanning seven decades, Outlaws to In-laws is a potted history of the cost of the political and social obstacles on the way to equal rights and gay marriage.

Part of the King’s Head’s Queer Festival, this ambitious production is a whistle-stop tour that takes in the Coronation, sexuality and race, the Tory Party, HIV/Aids and online dating. Packed into a lean two hours, several of the plays clunk hard as they struggle to make their characters more than on-the-nose emblems.

Those with more time to breathe fare best. Jonathan Kemp’s 1970s-set Reward, explores the growing relationship between white skinhead Spike (Jack Bence) and bookish young black man Donald (Michael Duke). Boosted by strong performances, it’s a nicely observed, affecting character study in an economically bleak landscape shadowed by racism.

Elsewhere, Matt Harris’ inventively surreal Princess Die dives into drag queen Shane’s comedown after learning his boyfriend is HIV+ on the night his idol, Princess Diana, dies. Alex Marlow’s bewilderment as Elliot Balchin’s Calvin Klein mannequin comes to life on his sofa is well pitched for this astringent farce.

Mary Franklin’s staging shifts nicely between plays, although it’s hampered by issues with audibility. But even through this production’s clumsier moments, the joyful message as Robin and Zak pop open the poppers and decide to live married life their way in Joshua Val Martin’s The Last Gay Play is loud and clear.

Tom Wicker

You can't accuse the King's Head Theatre of lacking enterprise. Presented as one of the centrepiece shows of their 2017 Queer Season, Outlaws to In-Laws is a compilation of seven short, specially commissioned plays that chart how the lives of gay men have changed, decade by decade, since the 1950s. It starts with Happy and Glorious, Philip Meeks's shrewd and witty appraisal of the tensions within a group of gay men gathered to toast the coronation of the Queen. It ends in 2017 with The Last Gay Play by Joshua Val Martin which dramatises the pre-wedding nerves of a gay man whose same-sex nuptials are about to be televised on Channel 5 and officiated over by his cleric-father. Not before a ding-dong in the belfry, however, which may possibly be resolved by the ring that has kept resurfacing since it was first seen in 1953 and connects these disparate dramas like a moving, understated motif.

The remit sets the writers a tricky challenge. They have to create a 15-minute drama that epitomises the period and offers us a fresh, individual take on it. Jonathan Harvey, author of stage hits such as Beautiful Thing and the Bafta-nominated sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, pulls off this feat with a real fusion of historical insight, wit, and humane perceptiveness in Mister Tuesday, the most engrossing and powerfully acted of the pieces here. It's set in 1965 and social change is in the air but homosexuality won't be decriminalised for another two years. This is a world that, though it may have relaxed in some respects, is still a blackmailer's charter. Harvey gives that situation an ironic and heart-breaking twist. We first see Peter (Jack Bence) and Jimmy (Elliot Balchin) sharing a post-coital cucumber sandwich in bed. In order to deter married policeman Jimmy from terminating this illicit weekly arrangement, Peter stoops to blackmail and their real love for each other is grievously warped.

Even-handed in its sympathies, Mister Tuesday allows itself the room to breathe, as does Jonathan Kemp's Reward, a compelling piece about National Front skinhead (Bence) and a bookish black teenager (Michael Duke) who fall for each other during the Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1977 and are confirmed in their love by the terrible price they are forced to pay for it. I also admired the energy and strutting verbal confidence of Brothas 2 by Topher Campbell which shows us two black friends in the early Noughties (played by Duke Myles Devonte) as they booze and browse through the profiles on a dating website that is visible to the audience. It's a funny and astute look at the, er, etiquette of cruising online, the discrepancies between digital identity and the flesh-and-blood reality, and the strain of keeping up appearances for a ruthless selection procedure that seems to rely on doctored images and racial and sexual stereotypes.

The Conservative Party conference provides the backdrop for 1984, Patrick Wilde's piece about the relationship between a young hotel waiter who is grappling honestly with the Aids crisis and one of Thatcher's speech writers whose struggle to remain in the closet has taken on a new and problematic urgency, given his insider-knowledge that Clause 28 is on the cards. Will he have the guts to confess his sexuality and resign? It's an intelligent play that has more to say than can be developed properly in the space. You feel frustration for the opposite reason with Matt Harris's Princess Die, an ingenious but sterile exercise in contrived coincidence. A young Princess Di impersonator (Alex Marlow), drunk, drugged-up and in disgrace after a bad social faux pas, discovers that his partner is HIV positive on the same day in 1997 that... well, look at the awful punning title. Elliot Balchin is eerily convincing as the draq queen's hallucination of a Calvin Klein model.

The master-stroke of Mary Frankin's remarkably deft and sensitive production is that a well-chosen and wonderfully versatile ensemble of six actors play all twenty of the figures who crop up in these pieces. Jack Bence is especially impressive in his ability to bring to vivid physical life characters as varied as the jealous lover whose insecurities drive him to blackmail, the reformed National Front thug and a desperate thief, rendered homeless after being diagnosed HIV positive. The good will generated by the actors is strong and cumulative and, thanks to them, a compilation that is uneven in the quality of the writing winds up feeling like more than the sum of its parts.

Paul Taylor

Gays were invented in 1952, according to this collection of short plays that looks at homosexuality in the seven decades since. Starting from the Queen’s coronation and ending at a gay marriage in 2017, the seven plays compiled in the ‘Outlaws to In-Laws’ range in time and in quality, but not particularly in tone.

Although there are some good writers involved, such as ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ creator Jonathan Harvey, the collection suffers from two major problems: a lack of imagination in the way the stories are told, and the frustrating fact that, at 20 minutes each, there is so little space to tell them. It just isn’t enough to get under the skin of any issue the plays raise – Section 28, race, AIDS, prostitution, religion and class. The format almost works against what the evening is trying to do.

Still, each piece has its moments, helped by a versatile six-strong cast. Paul Carroll gives a big, bitter performance as a drag queen in 1952. And in 1964, Peter, played by Jack Bence, suggests that the best an openly gay couple can be is ‘not a freak show’. Bence, in fact, is the best thing about this. He plays someone completely different in each play, from a reformed National Front member to a desperate thief, made homeless after being diagnosed HIV positive, intensely physical each time and shedding his skin for each new scene.

Matt Harris’s 1997-set play ‘Princess Die’, which sees Alex Marlow as a Diana impersonator hallucinating a Calvin Klein model into life, finds a fresh way to tell its story. The rest of the evening is a bit one-note, and it’s so frustrating because there are some mighty stories to tell buried in here.

The evening, directed by Mary Franklin, is sad and somber, and its tender moments are muted. That’s partly to do with the depressing history of being gay in this country – and it is powerful to have so much awful British social history presented in one evening, condensed and telescoped – but partly it’s to do with the sameyness of the plays.

Tim Bano