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Plague Over England
Finborough Theatre Spring 2008

Nicholas de Jongh's new play takes us back more than fifty years, to the time when gay men still called themselves queers and they lived under constant threat of exposure and even imprisonment.

His focus is Sir John Gielgud, who was arrested in October 1953 for approaching an undercover cop in a public toilet, but his net is cast much wider, to encompass many aspects of the gay experience in those dark ages.

And so, mixing real characters with fiction, we see viciously homophobic lawmakers and judges (with the irony that one has a gay son), the private Soho club for well-connected queers, a doctor offering his electric shock aversion therapy as a wonder cure, and the imagined affair of Gielgud's cop and a public school boy.

Gielgud himself was traumatised by the arrest, convinced that his career was over and his friends would all desert him. Neither fear proved valid, but he carried the scars for decades, remaining secretive in his private life and conservative in his choice of roles in an attempt to stay out of the headlines.

De Jongh's play is actually strongest in the non-Gielgud parts, showing the range of coping or non-coping stratagems of 1950s homosexuals. Some, like West End producer Binkie Beaumont, use minimal discretion and economic power to shield themselves while others, like the judge's son, feel the need to fight the system. An unhappy civil servant is never able to accept himself, even attempting a quack 'cure,' while an ex-pat American feels things are even worse in the States.

Viewing Gielgud from the outside, de Jongh never really captures the depth of the man's shock and despair, and although actor Jasper Britton gets the voice and the physical awkwardness exactly right, he only manages brief glimpses beneath the surface.

His strongest moment is one of the quietest. Filled with fear of how the audience will respond to his first entrance onstage after the arrest, Gielgud stands paralysed in the wings until Nichola McAuliffe as co-star Sybil Thorndike restages the moment to exit and come on with him, assuring him 'They wouldn't dare boo me.'

That actually happened, as did some of the other events, like Binkie Beaumont, after wavering only briefly, deciding not to replace Gielgud in his cast, or the many friends embodied here by one theatre critic sticking by him. And the play does succeed in conveying how much courage such loyalty took and what a real gift it was to the actor.

With most of the cast doubling and tripling roles, Nichola McAuliffe shines as the quietly kindly Thorndike and the motherly hostess of the Soho gay club, Simon Dutton is strong as both Binkie Beaumont and a hanging judge, and David Burt steals all his scenes, be he bartender or lav attendant.

Tamara Harvey directs fluidly on a set inventively designed by Alex Marker to make the most of this tiny above-a-pub theatre space, though there is every reason to believe the show will soon transfer to a larger venue.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Plague Over England - Finborough 2008