Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Conservative mores

Tory Boyz<br /> <em>Soho </em> Sick Room <br /> <em>Soho</em> The Pretender Agenda<br /> <em>New Players</em>

issue 06 September 2008

Tory Boyz
Soho

Sick Room
Soho

The Pretender Agenda
New Players

The Conservatives were once a party of proud Etonians and closet homosexuals; now they’re a party of closet Etonians and proud homosexuals. This is the background to Tory Boyz, a new play by James Graham for the National Youth Theatre which examines the shifting attitudes of the Tory high command to gays within their ranks. Clumsily arranged, the play opens with the age-old question about Ted Heath and then shifts to a group of ambitious researchers whose only connection with Heath is that they work in his old office. Scroll back a few decades and we’re shown young Ted as a predictably tortured soul, picking at the piano, doting on his mother, rejecting the advances of gorgeous blondes and methodically suppressing his instincts in the pursuit of his career. But what instincts, exactly? Keeping his proclivities secret was the only thing Heath ever managed competently.

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