Theatre / “Beautiful Thing” by Jonathan Harvey, directed by Jarrad West.  ACT Hub, Kingston, until October 15. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

IN choosing to stage, Jonathan Harvey’s “Beautiful Thing” as a substitute for Tommy Murphy’s play “Holding The Man”, which was postponed for covid-related reasons, director Jarrad West has stayed on track by selecting a play that is, quite simply, about love.

For amidst the hurly-burly of life in immediate post-Thatcher era, south-west London, it is the affecting relationship between two teenage boys that shines brightly in this work.

There are faint glimmers of other kinds of love, too – the tough love of barmaid mother Sandra (Amy Kowalczuk) for her truant 15-year-old son Jamie, (Nick Dyball) for instance, and a kind of brutal affection from the rebellious girl next door Leah (Liv Boddington) but by and large, it’s a pitiless environment.

In 2022 this is a period play and West’s huge creative team has rallied around to conjure up a London housing estate where people are doing it tough and a kind word is rarely to be found. Plastic garden chairs and much-loved pot plants are the best of what’s possible in this milieu and the paper-thin walls though which everything can be heard are the worst.

West has chosen a traverse staging configuration (the ACT Hub seating formation can be changed for each production) in which the audience members face each other lengthwise.

It’s a challenging mode, but it does allow the invective to have full force as the characters hurl insults at each other in a script, laced with coarse, acerbic dialogue and considerable wit that resonates with audiences.

It also allows for an intimate scene between the two boys, Ste (Liam Prichard) and Jamie when during a sleepover when is forced to escape his abusive family, but it also means that audience focus is sometimes dissipated over such a large arena.

Harvey’s script is notable for its ferocious dialogue, delivered by the cast a notch too high, I thought.

But it is also notable for its strongly contrasting, well-drawn characters – the fickle survivor mum – also played a notch too high by Kowalczuk, her quirky present boyfriend Tony (Colin Giles), who likes to show us as much of his body as he can and Leah, addicted to the music of Mama Cass, who, in one pitch-perfect scene, imagines herself becoming the famous Mamas & the Papas lead singer who reputedly choked to death on a ham sandwich.

Full of slapping, banging and shouting, “Beautiful Thing” often feels exhausting until you realise how cleverly Harvey has positioned the scenes to allow for a truly tender relationship to emerge between the affection-starved teenage boys, with two finely-calibrated performances from Dyball and Prichard. West’s direction allows this to emerge subtly.

Remarkable for its time, Harvey’s play is unpreachy. There is only a fleeting reference to HIV as the boys are reading a gay magazine and while a few opinions are expressed about the notorious gay bar, the Gloucester, the subject of same-sex love in is handled by Harvey in a straightforward way – “it’s only natural,” as Tony says.

After all the aggressiveness of their play’s first half, both Harvey as playwright and West as director conclude on a sweet, tender note with a long, slow fade as two couples dance on stage to a Mama Cass song.

Strap in for some language, but you can expect this to be an entertaining, emotionally uplifting evening in the theatre.