There’s a point at which bright becomes brittle, and another at which smart becomes smartass, and there are moments when Douglas Carter Beane’s bright, smart and often enjoyable play crosses both boundaries. Or is that only to be expected of a Broadway comedy on a subject we know from the late Rock Hudson and the present Ian McKellen to be painful — being in the closet, wanting to come out, and feeling that the public won’t allow it?
But at least this dilemma allows Tamsin Greig to give a terrific performance as a Californian agent: a sexual Cerberus or, rather, a bitch-goddess determined to keep her prize client trapped in the celeb hell that’s her personal heaven. Can she ensure that Rupert Friend’s Mitchell takes the lead in a film that’s being adapted from a play? But can she first persuade the original dramatist, who is gay, to change Mitchell’s character from a homosexual into a heterosexual? And can she steer the actor away from Harry Lloyd’s Alex, the improbably sophisticated rentboy who becomes his lover, and into nice, safe marriage?
Greig’s Diane makes entrances like John Wayne swaggering into a saloon, at one point blithely interrupting Mitchell and Alex in near-flagrante, and draws out her syllables as if to lasso anyone foolish enough to resist her. Yet she’s elegant as well as brash, brassy and commanding. You don’t see the embattled playwright who is on the other end of her mobile — or is present but invisible in scenes that add monologue and third-person narrative to conventional dialogue — but you feel for him when she softsoaps him, lies, threatens, ferociously sneers and ties him up in a contract that applies for eternity on “every continent, oilrig and polar ice cap”.
The trouble is that you don’t feel much for the visible characters who become her toys and victims: Friend’s affable but bland Mitchell, Lloyd’s sweet and considerate Alex, and Gemma Arterton as Alex’s forlorn girlfriend. There are plenty of sharp, sassy lines — “talking to you is like sewing a button on cottage cheese” — but very little sense of struggle, let alone depth. I suspect Beane and his director, Jamie Lloyd, would like us to see the play as a cutting yet affectionate portrait of four emotionally damaged loners in fame-obsessed America. That’s a stretch.
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