The summer of 1996 changed my life. A scrawny, dorky teenager averse to the footy field, I had an excitable personality only somewhat dampened by occasional schoolyard beatings. The instinct for survival buried any queer awakening, as did scant sex education and an isolating sense that this was a place where, as far as I knew, no gay people lived.
My parents relocated us to small-town Scotland on the south-western coast, apparently in search of a better life that, for the life of me, I was pretty sure lay in the Glasgow we vacated. Determined, I packed my bags and headed back there, aged 17, to study English literature at uni.
Pre-Grindr – or even a mobile phone – that first summer of independence I tentatively felt my way in a brave new world where the love that dare not speak its name shouted bloody loudly, actually, in the teeming gay bars that zapped me with an electric thrill, half-terrified, half-enraptured, every time I crossed the threshold.
It was also the year Hettie Macdonald’s glorious film Beautiful Thing, adapted by Jonathan Harvey from his tenderly plucky play – which debuted three years previously – burst joyfully onto cinema screens. I saw myself reflected in Glen Berry’s gawky, smart-mouthed and movie-loving Jamie, sneaking glances at his popular, footy-playing neighbour Ste (Scott Neal).
Set on a southeast London council estate in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s brutal rein and with the HIV/AIDS crisis still terrifying, its embrace of The Mamas & the Papas’ uplifting folk rock seemed to offer a magical respite. As the boys haltingly navigated intimacy via the unlikely medium of The Body Shop’s peppermint foot lotion, a long love affair with the story began, and soon afterwards I was fervently thumbing a copy of Harvey’s script.
Actor turned director Cal Robinson-Taylor came to the text a little later in life, in his twenties, while relocated from Melbourne to London, embracing his own coming out process in the hustle and bustle of Soho.
He will stage a new production of Beautiful Thing, the inaugural production of his North-by-South Theatre Company, at Prahran’s Chapel Off Chapel, having first caught the show’s 20th anniversary tour five years ago in Birmingham. He hadn’t heard of it, or the movie, previously.
“I was blown away that here was a '90s play that wasn’t about dying or great tragedy,” he says. “It was just finally two boys falling in love and the simplicity of that is beautiful.”
Arriving back in Australia last year, Robinson-Taylor found himself in the midst of the ferocious marriage equality debate. “I’d been living in ignorant bliss, because the UK has had marriage equality for years. But here we were, still debating this, when we have elect politicians to do exactly that.”
Beautiful Thing seemed like the perfect antidote. ‘’There were all these ads by the No campaign insinuating that were weren’t normal, and that things would change dramatically if we won, but two teenage boys fall in love exactly the same way as a boy and girl do.”
Deciding to cast youthful-looking 20-somethings in the roles of Ste (James Malcher) and Jamie (Sean Minahan), Robinson-Taylor felt they would more easily grasp the nuances of the script. Again, neither actor had heard of the story, but he was thoroughly impressed with how quickly they got it.
“James just knew Ste straight away, and the struggles of being a teenager and finding who you are,” he says. “And Sean, not only does he look 15 at 27, which is remarkable and I hate him for it, but he’s really got that innocence.”
Source: Supplied
Melina Wylie plays Jamie’s mum Sandra, a working class woman who has worked damn hard for what little they have and dreams of running her own pub. Middle class hippie Tony (Raphael Lecat) is the latest in a long line of boyfriends who haven’t always treated her so well. Though Sandra and Jamie butt heads, their bond is clear. Something that cannot be said for Ste, who is regularly beaten by his alcoholic father and drug dealer brother.
“Sandra is great, because she has had to fight for her whole life and her first instinct is to protect her son,” Robinson-Taylor notes.“She’s like a lioness, really. Everything she does is so that he can be okay... Ste has a really innocent relationship with her that Jamie, who treats her like dirt sometimes, does not. Ste is always respectful, because it’s something he doesn’t have.”
The tension built into the text, of course, is whether that tough love will weather the coming out storm after she harbours Ste following a particularly violent attack and the boys end up top-to-toe in bed. There’s trouble, too, in their Mama Cass-obsessed friend Leah (Ruby Wall) who loves a good gossip and regularly clashes with Sandra.
“Leah brings free spirit and truth to the whole scenario,” Robinson-Taylor says. “She’s kind of like a mini Sandra, and that’s why Sandra doesn’t like her, because she knows that type of girl, because that was her.”
Ultimately they’re all dreaming of some kind of escape, whether it’s the queer pub Ste and Jamie discover in a furtively acquired copy of the Gay Times, Sandra’s pub dream or Leah’s singing. “Leah listens to Mama Cass because it’s so different, because it’s not the concrete slab of the council flats,” Robinson-Taylor agrees. “And the Gay Times is Ste and Jamie’s golden ticket. That’s how they find other people like them. What we are dealing with here are boys who just want to feel normal, but that requires going to the pub, and that’s a challenge in itself.”
A challenge one 17-year-old Scottish lad overcame many moons ago, in a Glasgow summer not unlike Ste and Jamie’s in London, and later Robinson-Taylor’s too. “I went to a Christian private school, so it was always ‘gay people are bad’. Moving to London to study theatre, that’s where I found myself. My beautiful thing was just discovering the world, really, and learning who I was.”
Beautiful Thing is at Melbourne’s Chapel off Chapel Theatre June 6-10. For more info or to book tickets, click here.
