Photo: Jamie Scott-Smith
Receiving their London premiere, these two plays account for two thirds of Harvey Fierstein’s Safe Sex trilogy, a lesser-known successor to his Torch Song Trilogy, which had a four year Broadway run, as well as spawning a movie adaptation, and international performances including a more recent airing at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Instead of sequinned cabaret glamour, this sensitive production suffuses them with a quiet melancholy – a softer echo of Fierstein’s anger and frustration at living and writing in the time of AIDS.
Safe Sex opens with two men tumbling through the door in what the tabloids call a “passionate clinch” – their passion almost unfastened as they wrestle with buttons and braces. And then it’s completely undone by Ghee’s insistence that they stop to check “the list”. This list stands like a stone tablet in judgement over their sex lives, grave with the rules of preventing the transmission of AIDS. Neither has the disease, as far as we know, but Harvey Fierstein’s play starts as a psychological exploration of the weight that AIDS placed on gay mens’ relationships. Poignantly nostalgic about the days when the worst they feared was “the clap”, they reminisce about their carefree days before the disease hit.
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These days, as Ghee puts it, “Everyone’s scared. It’s normal to be scared.” But it also becomes gradually apparent that his fears are less universal, more nuanced and personal. CJ de Mooi as Ghee feels a little like a successor to Torch Song Trilogy’s Arnold – especially when he seeks refuge in a silk dressing gown – thanks to his vulnerable mix of neediness, neuroses, femininity and wry wit. He’s driven away Mead with his fear of physical intimacy, and torments him, now he’s back, with a range of excuses from worries about AIDS to repulsion at his sporadic showering habits. What Harvey Fierstein is actually pointing to, here, is the way that AIDS became medicalised cover for gay men’s own self-loathing and resulting fear of intimacy.
To highlight the text’s sudden swings in logic and sense of danger, Safe Sex was originally staged on a giant “teeter totter” (see-saw). Here, director Dan Phillips confines the play to the comforts of bed, making it a slightly leaden kind of pillow talk – although the terms of Ghee and Mead’s engagement are constantly shifting, this play is far from sprawling over the edges of its small allotted space.
By comparison, On Tidy Endings is a less self-contained, but more satisfying piece. Arthur (again played by CJ de Mooi) and Marion are mourning the death of a shared love one; her husband of 18 years, but his partner of the last three, as he cared from him during his decline from AIDS. They’re selling his flat, and splitting the proceeds 50:50 – around them, labelled cardboard boxes and sheafs of legal papers emphasise the brutal, contractual side of death, the parcelling out of emotional ties in the form of material goods and monies. Deena Payne is beautifully warm and natural as Marion, despairing of ever understanding what Arthur wants from her, until he explains the devastating impact of being ignored in private and public after gruelling attempts to care for and cure his dead partner. There’s levity, too, though. Daniel Purves is brilliantly chipper as Marion’s young son, Jim – pragmatic as the briskest City lawyer in the face of death. And Emma Blackman as the lawyer in question, is wittily, admirably abrupt, bursting with inappropriate remarks and motherly advice.
Ironically for a play called Tidy Endings, not all the strands Harvey Fierstein pulls out are tied up – although Marion and Arthur reach a truce, even an affectionate one,  the secret insurance policy Emma reserves for Marion alone is left unexplored. Still more devastating, the potential emotional fall out of Arthur being told by Jim that his father loved him third most, after him and Marion, falls flatly and unacknowledged.
This is in keeping with the production’s restrained approach. The first play of the Safe Sex trilogy, which has been omitted, negotiates the relationship between two men who meet on a night out, but post-AIDS are too scared to go home together. Without it, this is a slender evening, the two plot’s distinct identities confused by CJ de Mooi playing similar roles in the first and second plays. Still, director Dan Phillips’s decision to use British accents in restrained, closely naturalistic stagings is an intriguing, and largely successful one – a softly empathetic slice of a bold, angry trilogy.
First posted on Exeunt