Hard Fruit

Hard Fruit at the Royal Court Theatre

There’s nowt as queer as folk, as they say oop t’north, and there’s certainly nowt like the people in Jim Cartwright’s new play. There are stereotypes a-plenty in this northern town. The headscarfed neighbour, Mrs Kooee, and the outrageously camp Yank look like refugees from the sixties, and the script is larded with references to meat pies and factories – even clogs make an appearance, although somehow the cloth cops and whippets get left out.

This is obviously a milieu that Cartwright knows well. The theme is of masculinity, the cult of being tough and being able to look after oneself. It’s an attitude that still affects young men today, as can be demonstrated at any nightclub on Saturday night. But Cartwright goes further than that and throws homosexuality into the pot.

The central character, Choke (there’s a good monosyllabic masculine name for you) is an aging martial arts devotee tortured both by the cancer that’s killing him and by his inability to admit that he’s gay. His only interest is in fighting – it’s the only way that he can get any physical contact – and his weakening powers appal him. Everything revolves around physical effort, he can even see illness only in terms of the sneakiness of its attack.

The author obviously has some ear for poetry, and there’s a moving scene with Mrs Kooee, where Choke reveals the extent of his illness and his worries. But there’s very little of substance. What is Cartwright trying to say? That repressing homosexuality is a bad thing? That some of the toughest men are gay? That there’s an unsavoury cult of masculinity in northern towns? None of this is revolutionary, and the play has been stretched to last two hours (there are a lot of wrestling set pieces and some superfluous bits of dancing to fill out the time.

But Cartwright is well served by his cast. Nicholas Woodeson’s Choke is a strutting, proud bantam of a man who, all too late, realises his loneliness. Richard Hope’s Sump is his polar opposite, a man full of the joys of life and completely aware of his sexuality.

Pity poor Barry Howard who is lumbered with the task of making Yank, a man who would have been too feminine for Julian and Sandy, come to life and Hilda Braid does an admirable job of making something of Mrs Kooee.

It’s not quite enough to make the play come alive, but it’s a brave try.