Male bonding

Both these plays are about concealed sexuality. Straight, by D.C. Moore, is based on an American indie flick named Humpday. The play has one of the funniest openings you’ll ever see. We’re in a flat occupied by suburban nonentity Lewis and his wife Morgan. Lewis’s old college mucker, Waldorf, has come home after seven years in Mongolia and he cheekily decides to announce his return to western civilisation by inserting his unsheathed tumescence through the letterbox. Lewis doesn’t see it. His wife does and she has to persuade him that she isn’t hallucinating. The gate-crashing phallus symbolises the play’s theme of male eroticism thrusting itself uninvited into soporific domesticity.

Waldorf’s travels have loosened his inhibitions but intensified his competitive urges. After a night of booze and sexual dares, the two men agree to hire a hotel room and make a gay porn film starring themselves. Lewis then has to explain to his wife that homoerotic movie-making is a relatively normal activity for two Varsity chums.