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There’s plenty of scope for a sharp comedy about the sexual mores of twenty-first-century gay men. But this play – set in New York City and making its UK debut at LGBT-focused Above the Stag theatre – isn’t it. Strip out the namechecking of Grindr and Manhattan’s current crop of gay bars, and what do you have? An often unpleasant, cliché-ridden mess, pedalling tired stereotypes.
Following two unbelievable gay flatmates and their equally unbelievable friend try to guess which way their hot new neighbour swings, American writer Jason Mitchell sets his sights on ‘Sex and the City’ and hits something closer to ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’. I like a good farce, but the deeply predictable jokes here are trotted out like a checklist – not so much toilet humour as pipe-blockages.
It isn’t just that the play presents gay men as vapid, bitchy, borderline date-rapists and expects that to be enough to get us rolling in the aisles – oh, those guys! They’re such poorly drawn cartoons, it’s not clear why they’d even choose to live in the same city, let alone be the close friends Mitchell has them keep claiming they are. One relationship seems to materialise out of thin air just to create something akin to a conclusion.
The two-room apartment set makes impressive use of the theatre’s small space, and there’s a genuinely funny moment with a starry-eyed one-night stand whose lines stitch together the lyrics of a dozen Broadway songs. But Andrew Beckett’s production generally hurtles through the scenes at such a speed, it’s as if he and the cast are racing to get to the end. It’s hard to blame them.