Actor Danny Lee Wynter’s debut as a playwright concerns a tight-knit group of performers, some of whom are struggling while one has made it big. As they drink, fight, hit on each other and talk about their therapy sessions, it could spiral into navel-gazing self-indulgence, and sometimes does. Yet there is something vigorous about this ambitious play, however messy it may be.
Wynter also plays the central, troubled character, David, a small-time actor who becomes sexually embroiled with King (Dyllón Burnside), the star of this friendship circle who is famous for playing a Marvel-like superhero.
Directed by Daniel Evans, it seems at times almost like an accompaniment to Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy: the central characters are Black or mixed-raced queer men, and the play explores sex, identity and race, though the swing between satire and serious drama is out of kilter, and the emotions only hit home in the second half.
The play explores open gay relationships through the long-term couple King and Stevie (Ben Allen, an excellently satirised white liberal) – as well as same-sex marriage. Has fighting for the right to get married led the gay community to be more liberated or less, asks one character. There are debates about acting, race and representation, which feel latched on at times but are robust and energetic, some of them wrapped up in the comedy.
The play’s story meanders – deliberately it seems – and does not have enough of a trajectory, while the writing is also unruly, rendering the play quite disjointed as a whole. But even in its failed moments it feels interesting, alive and edgy.
What also lifts it is Joanna Scotcher’s inspired set which revolves around Ryan Day’s lighting design, whose poetic effects almost upstage the script: sets are built around plays of light with reconfigured scenes emerging out of momentary blackness.
The emotional force comes in the later scenes including one between David and his sister (excellently played by Rochenda Sandall) which is filled with complicated love. A devastating revelation is followed by a sex scene to show how childhood abuse can impact upon sexual desire. It treads similar ground to Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life in its themes of friendship, race, art and abuse, though this does not bring the same depth of drama as either of those works.
You wish the play had switched to this final gear earlier but there is enough intelligence and originality to make this a seductive debut.
At the Royal Court, London, until 29 April
