Outing Old Stage Frights
The Guardian
19 March 1992
Ian McKellen reviews "Not In Front of The
Audience", by Nicholas de Jongh (Routledge)
Nicholas de Jongh, late of the Guardian, is now theatre
critic for the London Evening Standard, some of whose writers have been
challenged as homophobic. In his preface to "Not In Front Of The
Audience," de Jongh tells us that he is gay. I hope he's keeping a
diary at the office.
Meanwhile, he has recorded a dark aspect of modern
theatre in his illuminating analysis of how badly British and American
playwrights have portrayed male homosexuality.
His method is simple. He unravels a series of plays
containing gay characters and assesses how truthfully they are portrayed.
Beginning with Coward's The Vortex in 1925, he proceeds
chronologically through to Kramer's The Normal Heart 60 years on.
Don't rush to plunder the index, to check whether he is right about, say,
Joe Orton (I think he is). You'd thereby miss long-forgotten clangers like
Mae West's The Drag, which was banned before it could reach Broadway.
Nor must you expect mention of the theatre or musicals. De Jongh's initial
attention is on gay characters and not gay writers.
His main thesis is incontrovertible. Up to and beyond
the abolition of censorship in Britain, dramatists pandered to their
bourgeois audiences' prejudices: wrists were limp;
degenerates threatened marriages and seduced minors;
lonely misfits took drugs or their own worthless lives. The same slanderous
stereotypes appeared in films of the period, and have been wittily
catalogued in Vito Russo's Celluloid Closet (Harper & Row).
For decades, West End audiences were denied the truth
about homosexuality, by strait-laced managements and theatre owners, allied
with the Lord Chamberlain, to whose grubby, censorious papers de Jongh has
had access. What is it about us gays which has been thought so threatening
to the status quo and so dangerous that the popular theatre of recent past,
like the popular press today, mocked us or told lies or censored all mention
of us? Could it be that some straight men (though fewer women) are uncertain
about their own sexuality?
Not that homophobia is restricted to heterosexuals. De
Jongh points an angry finger at craven gay writers like Terence Rattigan,
who disguised in his plays the homosexuality he hated in himself. On the
other hand, de Jongh writes movingly about the agonised poetry of Tennessee
Williams. Like all good drama critics, he is at his best in reacting
passionately to plays he has seen rather than just read.
By 1967, when gay men over 21 were at last permitted to
make love in private, an identifiable gay theatre was emerging from the
closet. Orton's anarchic wit had introduced gay eroticism to astonished
theatregoers. As a force for social change, Mr Sloane left Jimmy
Porter standing.
At the first night of Orton's What The Butler Saw,
on March 5, 1969, gallery hooligans tried to stop the show. I argued with
some of them on the pavement of Shaftesbury Avenue during the interval and
was restrained by Binkie Beaumont, the play's closeted gay producer, who for
two decades had presented Rattigan et al. His generation never accepted that
theatre need do more than just entertain.
That attitude was still evident in 1979, when Martin
Sherman's Bent was prematurely taken
off, because "it's not what we need in the West End at Christmas".
In the end, Sherman's play educated the world about the Nazis' "pink
triangles", whom historians had neglected. Kramer's The Normal Heart,
too, used drama more effectively than any journalist to expose the lies
surrounding AIDS.
These American, Jewish, gay playwrights, witty and
passionate, have now, too late for inclusion in de Jongh's listing, been
matched by another, Tony Kushner. His Angels In America, blazingly on
show at the National Theatre, ambitiously entwines politics and religion
with sexuality. At long last, dramatists are proud to be openly gay. To
appreciate the bravery and maturity of their achievement, you should
remember their predecessors, whom Not In Front Of The Audience deftly
exposes.
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