Two couples thrash out their differences after their nine-year-old sons are seen kissing at school. The straight pair, Sarah and Matt (Amy McAllister and Philip Correia), pretend to be open-minded but imply the son of the lesbian couple, Amira and Chloe (Seyan Sarvan and Eleanor Wyld), must have initiated it. “You realise you are essentially accusing our child of being some kind of sex pest?” Amira shoots back.
With this first showdown, Zak Zarafshan’s debut seems set to follow in the tradition of explosive family satires with parents coming to blows over their kids (from Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap). But The Boys Are Kissing takes a wacky turn and introduces supernatural forces in the form of two gay angels (Shane Convery and Kishore Walker) who exist on their own Mount Olympus, of sorts, looking down on these mortals and meddling mischievously in their lives.
Their arch, campy world (with glittery New Romantics attire and 1970s David Bowie makeup) intercepts the narrow-minded, small town moral panic sparked on a mums’ WhatsApp group over the kiss and the inclusive storybooks that Amira donates to the school. The play’s issues range from the trauma of coming out to LGBTQ+ children’s books.
It is an audacious direction to take – fantastically far-fetched and delightful on the whole. The angels, in their song and dance numbers, look like RuPaul’s glamorous lip-syncers and do not so much interrupt the human drama as lead it in several amusing, and key, scenes.
While the play has oodles of chutzpah and charm, it is not without its hiccups. Lisa Spirling’s production is well performed but stuffed with issues and baggy in pace. It falls into telling, even preaching, with earnest argument around tolerance and the tone switches, jarringly, from fizzing satire and farce to simplistic didacticism. That is particularly the case in the protracted final set-piece.
But it is hard to hold this against a play that is so adventurous in form, and so entertaining with it. Zarafshan has bold talent and this debut is an exciting discovery.
At Theatre503, London, until 4 February
