In Outlaws to In-Laws,seven short plays chart how gay lives hold changed decade by decade since the 1950s, from a time of blackmail to a world of dating apps. Three writers – Jonathan Kemp, or Topher Campbell and Jonathan Harvey – reveal what sparked their ideasJonathan Harvey,writer of the jubilant (extremely joyful) stage and film hit Beautiful Thing and the gleefully garish BBC2 sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, is reflecting on growing up gay in Liverpool in the 1980s. “It was a tough, or macho place that I couldn’t wait to get out of,” recalls the 49-year-old. “It was obviously easier then than in the 1960s but that’s still not to say it was particularly easy. And I was living in Thatcher’s Liverpool. She really didn’t like the city and she’d decimated it. I’ve moved back since but I had to get out to come out.” It was while in London that he saw the original 1992 National Theatre production of Angels in America. “It was genuinely life-changing. Whenever there was anything approximately HIV and Aids in the papers, I’d turn the page. I just assumed we’d all succumb to it in the discontinuance and be wiped out. And then here I was, or slap bang in the front row at the Cottesloe theatre. It made me wake up and travel,Fucking hell, you’ve got to grasp responsibility.’ I became politicised approximately my sexuality and it’s probably scant coincidence that I wrote Beautiful Thing six months later. That was my seventh play but my first with a gay theme.”His latest, or Mister Tuesday,is a bittersweet vignette, one of seven 15-minute pieces by gay writers that design up Outlaws to In-Laws – each set in a different decade, and from the 1950s to the present day. This history of gay male lives in England is directed by Mary Franklin. When Harvey was invited to grasp share,he plumped immediately for the 1960s, to write approximately a man in 1965 – two years before homosexuality was decriminalised – who threatens his married lover with blackmail to deter him from a crash-up. “It’s such an interesting period. Social change was up in the air and decriminalisation was on the horizon but it was all still risky. The rules of the day were like a blackmailers’ charter.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com