TheatreReviewRoyal Court, LondonYou may, according to taste, find the title a come-on or a turn-off. But, far from being a sensational shocker, Mike Bartlett's play is a sharp, witty study of a man helplessly torn between his longtime male partner and a loving woman. Bartlett's theme, in fact, is less tortured bisexuality than the paralysing indecision that stems from not knowing who one really is.
Ironically, the dithering protagonist, John, is the only character to be given a name. But it is his lack of any definite identity that throws everyone into a spin. To his stockbroker partner, M, he is a slightly irritating but lovable household fixture. To the divorced classroom assistant, W, whom he quixotically goes to bed with, he becomes a shield against solitude. Matters come nicely to the boil in a quasi-Ayckbournian dinner party where John, simultaneously pledged to both parties, is finally forced to make a choice.
I would have liked more social detail: how, I wondered, does the hapless John actually earn a living? And at certain points you feel he is simply a selfish twerp who uses his personality defect as an excuse for inflicting pain. But irritation is forestalled by the acuity of the writing and by the wiry charisma of Ben Whishaw who, having played Hamlet, knows a thing or two about vacillating uncertainty.
Everyone, in fact, in James Macdonald's beautifully crisp production is spot-on: Katherine Parkinson as the tender divorcee, Andrew Scott as John's bubblingly outraged partner and Paul Jesson as the latter's blusteringly protective dad unexpectedly invited to dinner. And it seems wholly apt that Miriam Buether's set turns the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs into what looks like a circular dissecting-chamber since Bartlett's play examines, with clinical precision, what Schopenhauer once called "the tyranny of the weak."
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