”The Boys are Kissing” at Theatre503 – review

If Alan Ayckbourn, that wry chronicler of peculiarly British social awkwardness and middle-class anxiety, were to collaborate with the high priest of camp comedy Jonathan Harvey, and got script consultation from Angels In America‘s Tony Kushner at his most magic realist, the result would probably be something like this. As playwriting debuts go, Zak Zarafshan’s The Boys are Kissing certainly doesn’t lack ambition.

In Lisa Spirling’s joyfully flamboyant production, it tackles nature versus nurture, latent homophobia, the presence of LGBTQ+ information within the education system, the power struggles in apparently happy relationships… and divine intervention when it all gets a bit much. This is put over with heart, hope, many genuine belly laughs and a gallery of appealing characters that don’t always behave as one might expect, but seldom strain credulity.

Zarafshan opens with a butt-clenchingly awkward (and consequently hilarious) meeting between two married couples, one straight and one lesbian, whose nine-year-old sons have been caught kissing. The contrast between the laid-back reaction of the lesbian pair (“they kissed, they didn’t hijack a plane”) with that of the straight couple, so desperate to appear ‘right on’ and accepting but revealing tiny glimpses of prejudice with every borderline crass utterance, is beautifully managed.

This is thrown into sharp relief by the arrival of a pair of all-seeing, commentating cherubs, members of “the ancient celestial order of queer guardians”, who look as though they’ve just wandered in from a heavy night in Heaven (the London gay club, that is). Shane Convery, bearing a remarkable resemblance to Annie Lennox in her heyday, and a winningly louche Kishore Walker are great value as this fierce, funny duo who periodically drop into the earthbound action to wreak havoc or hold a mirror up to the flailing, flawed mortals. If it’s all a bit fanciful and daft, Convery and Walker make it work by sheer force of personality and some killer comic timing.

Amy McAllister is quite brilliant as a gossipy young mum so bent out of shape by trying to be seen to be doing the right thing that she ends up getting almost everything wrong while Philip Coreia invests her bewildered husband with a touching sensitivity amongst all the bluster. Eleanor Wyld is utterly lovely as the endlessly kind, reasonable and patient homemaker who finds herself pushed to the absolute limit. As her hard-nosed and heavily pregnant lawyer wife, Seyan Sarvan has the least well-developed role but still finds some light and shade. There are moments, particularly in the second act when the parents get to face their grown-up offspring and are forced to reflect on the long-term effect their early choices may have had, where the characters start to sound more like mouthpieces for a selection of opposing views rather than fully realised people. However, the vitality of this cast and staging ensures that it remains pretty engaging even as it verges on the didactic.

Ultimately, it’s hard not to love a play where a character achieves unexpected spiritual enlightenment when naughty cherubs hijack her yoga session with some personalised, potty-mouthed affirmations and a quick blast of Britney, or where a pair of gyrating, truncheon-swinging Village People-style cops burst through the walls of the set to settle a rancorous dispute. What’s particularly wonderful is that, for all the outrageous campery and breaking of the fourth wall, the human dilemmas at the play’s heart never feel shortchanged. If structurally the piece is a little messy, Zarafshan’s unfettered imagination and zestful gift for comic dialogue rooted in truth, are surely something to celebrate. It’s thought-provoking and eventually rather touching, but most of all, it’s great fun. I enjoyed it very much.