After homophobic vandals scrawled graffiti on the posters for Jewish arts festival GAYW3, actor Tom Ross-Williams offered them tickets to ‘Run’. In it, he plays a gay Jewish teenager who's caught between an active fantasy life and an increasingly anti-Semitic London. Like its star's gesture, Stephen Laughton's play is a rebuff to bigots that bursts with well-meaning energy.
It burst with a lot of other things, too. Laughton's text is a feverish, love-drunk monologue that brims over with detail, some of it telling, some of it just muddling. It explodes into constellations, as Yonni imagines his romance with another teenager as a meeting of planets: Venus and Ganymede (of course). It propels itself into fantasy, as the two boys save a beached whale together. And you could cater a bar mitzvah with the liberal references to Jewish staples: challah, bagels, schmaltz.
Ross-Williams is endearingly daffy as Yonni, channel-hopping between memories in his fractured, 70-minute solo. In a smaller theatre, with audiences packed into Yonni’s teenage bedroom, you can his story would hit home. In a venue that used to be an underground car park, less so. Under Lucy Wray’s direction, Ross-Williams barely uses the echoing grey stage, and bursts of electronica from the half-baked sound design make the story feel more disjointed, not less.
With anti-Semitism on the rise, 'Run' feels completely timely, and it's so clearly written from the heart that I could see how it would leave some audiences sobbing. But after all this invention, an ending that relies on the doom-and-gloom cliches of gay love stories feels like one tug at the heartstrings too many.