Among Angels ☆☆
Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton, London
“The realm of the Gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know.” – Joseph Campbell
The idea that we live among angels has been a source of inspiration for many artists, from Rainer Maria Rilke to Wim Wenders, and more recently Tony Kushner. Timothy Graves’ play takes its title from a Kate Bush song, and tells the story of a young gay school teacher, Chris Johnson (Stephen Papaioannou) who is arrested and charged with raping a man during a chemsex session.
The first half of the play moves backwards from the night of the alleged assault and is fast-paced and engaging, as we revisit the chemsex party, with strong performances from all involved, as the play moves from an initial naturalism to a surrealism that introduces the angels amongst whom Chris moves, one of whom seems to be an ex-lover who has died. I say seems to be because it was never clear to me and this interplay between the real and the surreal creates a great deal of confusion as the play takes on more and more big themes.
Did Chris sexually assault the man who’s reported him to the police? Does Christ die from a drugs overdose at a sex party hosted by a drug-dealing Satanist? (I only learned that this character is a Satanist from an interview with the author – it’s never mentioned in the play).
In the second half, Chris becomes a spectator of the play he’s in and this sudden leap into the metatheatrical (Chris had displayed some acting talent in his youth that he never pursued) only added to my confusion. Perhaps this uncertainty is meant to create a hallucinatory feel: what’s real and what isn’t? But I was left unsure what I was meant to take away from this play. At the start, Chris is arrested in his own flat, but at the end, he dies (or doesn’t) in the Satanist’s flat. The characters feel rather one-dimensional and as a result less than human: drug-dealer=bad, school teacher=good.
Yes, chemsex is bad sometimes, but when the Satanist suggests dissolving a corpse in his bath we enter the territory of a psychopathology that adds one more element to an already issue-laden story.
This is Graves’ first play and while it shows ambition in its willingness to tackle big issues, it tries to cover too much in 90 minutes and as a result doesn’t really do justice to any of them.
There is an important play to be written about the dangers of chemsex, but this isn’t it.
Directed by Peter Taylor
http://www.thecourtyard.org.uk/whatson/1164/among-angelsUntil April 27th
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Correspondent Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2019, Jonathan Kemp, London, theatre review
