London-based American writer Matthew López is best-known for two works centring on gay male experience. His prize-winning, seven-hour drama The Inheritance reworked EM Forster’s novel Howards End into an examination of the lives of gay men in New York post-Aids, and opened to acclaim in London in 2018. In 2023 López co-wrote and directed Red, White & Royal Blue, the film of Casey McQuiston’s novel of the same name about a relationship between the sons of a US president and a British royal.
Something of both works comes across in Reverberation, López’s 2015 play, receiving its European premiere in Bristol. A meet-cute, romcom brightness of tone bubbles from a situation rooted in the darkness of remembered traumas of violence and rejection, as three lonely characters struggle, in Forster’s famous phrase, to “only connect”.
