Theatre: Shaun de Waal
Insofar as Beautiful Thing, at Cape Town’s Baxter Studio, resolves itself without undue trauma to the audience, it is a ”feel-good” production. We come to care about these working-class East-Enders. (Their accents, though, make one wonder whether this shouldn’t have been called Beautiful Fing.)
Jonathan Harvey’s play tells the story of 16-year-old Jamie (Nicholas Dallas), who gets romantically involved with the boy next door, Steve (Brian Webber).
Harvey, who at the relatively tender age of 26 has written a good handful of plays, has a polemic purpose: Beautiful Thing was composed as debate raged in the British Parliament over the law governing the age of consent for gay sex. The legal limit was lowered from 21 to 18, but both Jamie and Steve are still under-age, and Harvey clearly finds it silly that there be one law for heterosexuals (who may mate at 16) and another for
But the play does not labour this point. As a solid, though utterly charming, piece of social realism, it tells a simple story of young love, its context hinted at by adjacent characters. There is Jamie’s bartending single mother, Sandra, played flamboyantly and very well by Terry Norton. There is neighbour Leah (Sally Stokes), whose amusingly absurd fixation with Mama Cass is her spiritual relief from a life that seems headed nowhere. Pierre Malherbe does his best with Sandra’s hippy-dippy lover, a somewhat sketchy role.
The interactions between these characters — moving between aggression and affection, uncertainty and reassurance — propel a play that is basically comic, overcoming its unhappy moments to sweetly touching effect.
Stokes and Norton have some wonderfully funny scenes, and the quivering tenderness with which Jamie and Steve discover each other seems like the result of an especial rapport between Dallas and Webber — both of whom are excellent. It carries tremendous power in such an intimate theatre.
Director Fred Abrahamse and designer Brian Collins make good use of the two-part set, initially the balcony of a high-rise flat-block, which then accomodates a slice of Jamie’s bedroom when necessary.
Feel good one does, when it’s all over, even if the ending that comes after a certain amount of snivelling is a tad too slick. The play gestures towards a darker narrative — Steve’s violently abusive father lurks off-stage. We never see him, but we know he’s there; we sense him in Steve’s anguish. It’s as though there’s another play, a depressing tragedy, next door to this one. Steve, thankfully, escapes from that play and into Beautiful Thing.