'Gently Down The Stream' at the Park Theatre

The Park Theatre recently put on a production of  'Gently Down The Stream' a new play by Martin Sherman. I don't know much about his work other than he wrote 'Bent' about the persecution of gay men by the nazis in Germany. That was a particularly powerful play so it was worth seeing what else he's written and that's how I ended up at the bijou Park Theatre a few weeks.

'Gently Down The Stream' is about an older gay man from New Orleans who's worked in the music business around the world all his life, ending up as a pianist in London. A man 30-odd years his junior meets him one night and goes back home with him and that's where we join the play.

The fun and joy of the morning after and learning about your partner shifts into the safety and tensions of living together as the relationship develops and the characters share details of their pasts and hopes for the future. And then the bombshell of the younger man finding another man, who is even younger, and he moves out, later to marry and adopt a child. The older man continues as a friend and mentor and, as he experiments with sex apps and gay holidays the younger pair settle in to domesticity.

It's an odd play in a way, looking at life and 'gay life' from two different angles, an older and a younger man. The older man grew up in a time of homophobia when it wasn't even legal to be gay while the young man enjoys the freedoms that his predecessors won for him. He looks back on the 1950s and '60s as a golden age of glamour and secret liaisons whereas the older man remembers of time of victimisation, of hurt and of losing friends to mindless cruelty. And then we see the 'present' day when gay men and women can marry, adopt children and live safer lives (although not totally safe or equal) as the younger men who've grown up in a safer world settle down and it's the older man still experimenting and expanding his world. It's quite strange in a way but a very thoughtful play. I'm pleased we went to see it