It’s a record breaker. The Trafalgar Studio is staging a rare revival of Christopher Hampton’s breakthrough play, written when he was 18, which made him in 1966 the youngest writer ever to have his work staged in the West End. This record has now stood for so long that it could probably do with a lie-down.
The plot, meticulously fashionable and youth-orientated, focuses on an unrequited affair between Ian and his flatmate Jimmy. Hampton’s conception of personality is underdeveloped. And overdeveloped, too. Most of his characters are handsome, vague, middle-class numbskulls, posh little tadpoles wriggling around a cosy pond. But the central character, Ian, is a brilliant study of brooding, adolescent misogyny. Fiercely intelligent, magnificently charismatic and overwhelmed by loneliness and self-doubt, Ian might have become a world-class political psychopath.
But this is the 1960s so he frets about his sexuality and yearns forlornly for handsome swains who give him nothing in return.
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