‘Gently Down the Stream’ review

A fairly steady stream of American plays find their way to London after a successful run in their native country. They often involve a lot of ‘real life’ activity on stage, like doing the washing up and changing light bulbs. And just as frequently, they somehow fail to quite translate to a British audience. But drop the cynicism, because here’s one that’s well worth seeing.

Veteran playwright Martin Sherman’s ‘Gently Down the Stream’, which comes to the Park Theatre following a successful run at New York’s Public Theater, is set entirely in the warehouse-conversion apartment – all coffee-table art books and exposed brickwork – of Beau (Jonathan Hyde), an older Southern gentleman hailing from a now long-forgotten New Orleans.

His first foray on Gaydar leads to him meeting Rufus (Ben Allen), a much younger British guy who works in mergers and acquisitions but talks like a character in ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’. 

The past, to Beau, is ‘the past’, while to his new boyf, ‘the past is sexy’. Thanks to Rufus’s romanticising of Beau’s earlier experiences – he even starts recording a video memoir of them – Sherman’s play becomes a flipbook of scenes from their relationship interspersed with a potted history of gay male life in America and Britain: the obscene public homophobia Beau witnessed contrasting with the advent of gay marriage rights and the normalising of gay parents raising children.

The cleverness of the play is that the format never becomes didactic. This isn’t a history lecture, it’s a very real – and frequently sweet – picture of a small group of individuals. It helps that Hyde is also a real buzz to watch. He revels in flippant comedy early on – ‘I thought I arranged for a fuck, not an interview’ he quips at one point – before providing some of the most moving passages of the play.

In fact, many of best moments occur when Sherman hits on the universally painful moments of relationships, less the big stuff, more the poetry of small tragedies – like being dumped and cracking open the Ben and Jerry’s, only to discover it’s too bloody frozen for the spoon to go in.