Southwark Fair by Samuel Adamson. Ever heard of it? Nor me but it sounds like a sprawling comedy of manners written by some forgotten Enlightenment wag. I trotted along to the Cottesloe full of expectation but I was in for a let-down. Samuel Adamson is no wag. Nor is he enlightened. And as for forgotten, well, it won’t take long. The play, staged on the South Bank of the Thames, is also set on the South Bank of the Thames. Good idea? Possibly. But as the action unfolds you quickly see what trouble the author has given himself by disregarding one of the basic conventions of drama. Most plays are set in the home or the workplace. Adamson’s show is set on the river bank and his characters drift around bumping into each other by accident and — rather implausibly — becoming instantly involved in each other’s lives. It feels odd and wrong. All the characters are gay, too (or at least the ones Adamson cares about), which further weakens the sense of realism. The dialogue has an air of forced whimsicality. ‘Agitate the unfaithful bone,’ says a New Yorker musing on fidelity, ‘and it jigs away like Jolson.’ Who speaks like that? No one but a playwright who needs to take a a remedial writing course. Check his CV, though, and you find that Adamson teaches creative writing at post-graduate level.
Most surprisingly, he revives all those dying stereotypes about ‘mincing poofters’. You’d think he was a rampant homophobe from the way he pillories gay men as a set of whiney, screwed-up, posturing misogynists preoccupied with T-shirts, cruising and getting Chef to reheat their carbonara. You’ve never seen such a bunch of screamers.
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