“Darling, I think I have a serious problem,” croons singer-songwriter John Grant in this new dance show. The problem belongs to George, teaching at a Californian college in the early 1960s. He’s going through the motions because life stopped when his lover, Jim, died in a car accident, and George can’t – won’t, doesn’t dare – move on. On Chiara Stephenson’s set, everything in his life appears ash-grey, like the disastrous aftermath of Pompeii.
Gay male grief: a bold subject for 1964. After completing A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood described the novel as his masterpiece; for Edmund White this was “the first truly liberated gay novel in English.” More recently, it was filmed with exquisite tristesse by Tom Ford. Director-choreographer Jonathan Watkins gives it more lust and agitation – his movement butt-wiggling, unapologetically groin-y.
