'Coming Clean' transfers to Trafalgar Studios in January 2019. This review is from July 2017.
It’s been 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality in the UK. This has been marked on TV and print by a lot of reflection on the course of LGBT history since. It feels appropriate, then, for the Kings Head Theatre to revive the debut play of one of British gay theatre’s big names, Kevin Elyot.
Watching ‘Coming Clean’ – which kicks off the Kings Head’s Queer Season and was first staged in 1982 – is like tracing the shape of Elyot’s plays to come, most notably his landmark HIV/AIDS work, ‘My Night with Reg’: rumbling domestic drama, zingy one-liners and a younger man upsetting the status quo.
When wannabe writer Tony (Lee Knight) hires out-of-work actor Robert (Tom Lambert) as a cleaner, it ends up challenging just how happy he really is about his open relationship with partner Greg (Jason Nwoga).
‘Coming Clean’ confronts questions of flexible fidelity in a way that still strikes a chord today, if you swap Grindr for discos. And, in one of its best scenes, Elyot doesn’t tip-toe around Tony’s anxieties over his sexual performance. There’s a truthfulness in its frankness.
But, watching it now, ‘Coming Clean’ feels distinctly like rough-cut Elyot. The dialogue, while funny, is often laboured, while characters are yanked from one stance to another to fit the issues the play wants to tackle. The deceptively effortless tragi-comic resonance and bittersweet sting of ‘My Night with Reg’ is lacking.
These are issues that director Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s uneven production, which fluffs a few key moments, doesn’t really tackle. For Elyot’s larger-than-life characters to feel real, they need to be played from the inside out. Here, they come on as completely different people between acts. Lambert’s Mozart-loving Robert goes from awkward to sex object in 0-60, draping himself over a door frame in the buff.
Nwoga, meanwhile, struggling with a New York accent, mainly gets stuck with glowering as Greg. And while Knight is moving as a tearful Tony, trying to salvage his relationship, it’s really only Elliot Hadley as neighbour William who lands both the comedy and pathos. Whenever he’s on stage, ‘Coming Clean’ snaps into focus.