Theatre

Luke Sutherland’s dazzling urban fairy tale – about one man’s extraordinary gift to touch with touch – is being made into a Channel 4 film. Tam Dean Burn, adaptor, co-director (along with Christine Devaney) and sole performer of the National Theatre of Scotland’s stage version, will not be in it, or so he insists during the introduction, because he isn’t handsome enough to play its ‘gorgeous Orcadian’ protagonist. If this is true, it is a great loss. His generous and multifaceted performance transcends the physical to reveal the play’s deeper, more intuitive truth about our longing to connect and the avenues of sex, love, violence and drugs that we walk down to achieve it.

The story retraces the steps of a dying rent boy, latterly known as Désirée, from his giddy childhood on the Orkney Islands to the squalor and intermittent splendour of the back streets of Soho to his final moments, ending the play where it starts. ‘Venus as a Boy’ is a multi-sensory whirlwind, heightened by Lizzie Powell’s lighting and superb live musical accompaniment from Sutherland himself (before he was an acclaimed novelist, Sutherland was frontman for Scot-rock innovators Long Fin Killie and a violinist for Mogwai). So fantastical is this story of celestial sexual prowess and a transvestite who turns to gold, that a lesser actor might fall victim to caricature. But it is a testament to Burn’s great skill that even his portrait of a former neo-Nazi pimp is imbued with humanity and truth. Violence, addiction, exploitation and racism all sit in the shadows of this touching tale, but it is impossible not to be warmed by its light.