Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel about gay love, grief and alienation is a searing story but one that’s tricky to adapt for the stage. Joycean in spirit, it is set in 1960s California and takes us through a day in the life of a gay middle-aged Englishman, George. This production – lean, inventive but fatally grounded in its action and effects – ends up proving the story’s inherent anti-theatricality.
The book is led by thought, rather than action, and its tone is a mix of the comic, spiritual and melancholic: George’s grief for his dead lover, flaring memories of love, matter-of-fact domestic detail and bathos, all of which give it great underlying emotional power. But here the tone feels flat, stripped to archness and emotionally distant.
