The Pride

Jerwood Upstairs:
This is a persuasive account of that sexual – and emotional – emancipation from the point of view of two gay men (Oliver and Philip) and the straight woman (Sylvia) who brings them together. Like Caryl Churchill before him, Campbell imagines his 30-something trio trying to live in two British historical moments: 1958 and now. In the enjoyably clipped drawing room dialogue that opens the '50s story, JJ Feild's bonhomous Philip, an estate agent, is married to Lyndsey Marshal's Sylvia, who illustrates the children's books of Bertie Carvel's naively intense Oliver. The undercurrents are handled beautifully in Lloyd's production. It segues into the present day by having a Nazi-uniformed actor (who present-day journalist Oliver is paying to humiliate him) stride unseen into the trio's unspoken and (in 1958) unspeakable crisis. Campbell's play – his first – is a 2-hour-long drama of sensibility which refuses to fashionably duff its audience up with shock tactics. Importantly, it refutes the assumption made in the 1950s (and, differently, by Oliver's hilarious men's mag editor), that gay men cruise for sex not love. It also reveals how modern-day Oliver (played with brilliantly self-mocking appeal by Carvel) might be drawn to sucking the cock of his oppressor not (as his eitor assumes) out of pure fun and freedom, but out of the historical backstory – revealed by the tragedy of '50s Oliver and Philip – of his present identity.