THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
When Christopher Isherwood’s novel appeared in 1964 it was acclaimed for its artistry but shunned by many for its daring content. It rightly went on to be considered a founding text of modern gay literature. For once, here was a confident gay man, not presented as a neurotic or a problem to be solved and it wasn’t about coming out. Instead, it focused on something universal: how you accommodate yourself, in the long term, to bereavement, in this case the central protagonist’s long term partner has been killed in a car crash.
Set in California in 1962, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis has spooked everyone, we meet George (Theo Fraser Steele) a middle-aged, gay, Englishman, employed as an English professor in a college and living comfortably in the Los Angeles suburbs. He is an outsider is so many ways and Steele deftly captures George’s arch public school Britishness and how he quietly navigates the chilled vibe of ‘60s LA. Caitlin Abbott’s designs and costumes simply but perfectly capture those halcyon California days, and Beth Duke’s sound design includes some perfectly chosen songs of the era.
George is locked in the grip of bereavement and unable to move forward and the story follows him on a very ordinary day as he has various encounters with different people which color his senses and illuminate the possibilities of being alive in the world. But, we’re left with the suspicion that this might be his last day?
You may recall Colin Firth who was perfect in the acclaimed 2009 film version. There, the fashion designer Tom Ford, making his directorial debut, expertly suffused each frame with a sort of sensual grief. It had a languid quality (like an Ozu film), and he found a way to translate into visual terms that novelistic focus on textures and on buttoned-up emotions. The danger with stage adaptations of novels is that too often they degenerate into plot, but here the plot isn’t the point. The piece is inherently undramatic and adapter Simon Reade and director Philip Wilson haven’t really found a way to make it work on stage.
We observe him teaching Huxley to a class of unmoved but ambitious students, and having dinner with a close friend Charley (Olivia Darnley) in a long dinner scene that rambles on. She’s another English expat and desires a deeper relationship with him but who frustrates him with her inability to understand the relationship he had with his ex, Jim. The piece is great on the relentless slow hum of homophobia which underscored that society, despite its professed liberalism.
George is gently stalked by a handsome young student Kenny, played by Miles Molan making an impressive debut. They end up in a bar, going skinny dipping and Kenny stays over in a separate room, but it never blossoms to anything more substantial, although what’s interesting is how the encounter is more about Kenny’s personal journey than George’s. Steele struggles with the awkwardness of that scene and in general with calibrating George’s torrent of conflicting emotions. He’s often too tetchy or prissy and you wonder therefore about his ability to charm all he meets. The writing is great though on the sexual politics of the time when, for gay people, every day was about constant vigilance.
For lovers of the novel or the film it is definitely worth a wallow, but it never reaches their heights.
