Set in a company’s football clubhouse, Steam, a new gay play that runs at the Barons Court Theatre, London, from 5-10 June 2007, asks questions about truth, power and the consequences of hiding your sexuality both at work and in relationships.

The action is set entirely in the locker room, a place endlessly fetishised in porn scenarios, where men come to discard the signs and signifiers of the office world to become part of something more primal, a ritualistic playground where hidden tensions in the office can be played out in a ritualistic locking of horns, where tests of strength, endurance and alpha male battles for superiority ensue.

Throw into this already volatile mix a woman attempting to find out whether her suspicions about her lover’s sexuality are correct or not, her ex-lover, an office geek and an openly gay young man and the scene is set for a potentially fascinating pressure cooker of repressed desire, half realised rituals of domination and submission, and the explosive potential of truth telling.

The playwright, Jason Charles, believes that the locker room is traditionally the place where men let down their guard, along with their clothes and he uses this to explore the idea of people leading double lives, being one thing at home and another person at work, or at play.

The autobiographical event which planted the creative seeds for the play was an encounter with a man too scared of his sexuality to pursue his true desires for fear of losing status at work. In the play this repression manifests itself as homophobic bullying. Matt (Alan Mirren) the alpha male figure in the locker room, struts and preens as a self proclaimed ‘god of fuck’ and pushes his work colleagues and would be football teammates to expose their own desires and fantasies as a way to keep his own hidden.

The playwright has a potentially fascinating character here, shades of a Tennessee Williams style macho anti-hero with a fatal flaw, not his sexuality per se, but the methods he uses to deny its expression. Everyone around him is affected adversely by his decision to pursue an ideal of status granted him by an exaggeration of machismo in the workplace.

The two figures desperate to expose the truth behind Matt’s façade are his girlfriend Vanessa (Jeniffer Daley) and the 18 year old openly gay male Billy (Stephen Weston).

With the former the play nods to tabloidesque Cheryl Tweedy/Ashley Cole ‘is he isn’t he’ inferences, whilst the verbal sparing and sometimes all too real explosions of violence that occur between Matt and Billy nod to a darker scenario of submission and dominance. The later is more convincingly explored though never fully developed in the production.

Although he appears to be the subject of homophobic bullying, at times it seems as if Billy is almost deliberately provoking and getting off on Matt’s explosive reactions to his taunts. In this way it is the sexually provocative 18 year old, fully in control of his sexuality, that has the upper hand over his would be tormentor. It’s a potentially fascinating idea and is reminiscent of Jean Genet’s classic power inversions where the sexual outcast exerts his sense of freedom by eroticizing the oppressor. 

Both Billy and Vanessa secret themselves behind a two way mirror in the clubroom  to observe the locker room politics play themselves out and in doing so enjoy a voyeuristic and panoptical power over everyone. In this way, and this is also emphasised by the staging, the audience becomes complicit in their voyeuristic quest to find out the interplay in the characters lives between truth and lies.

There are many interesting ideas here - the cast uniformly play to the scripts strengths and are helped by fluid direction from Steve Hubbard - yet the evening remains a frustrating one. The key ideas, set up in the plays exposition, are never really developed or interrogated and so fail to take flight.

There are some truly challenging questions raised throughout about the relationship between sexuality, violence and the consequences of repressing desire for the sake of status, yet it feels as if what we get with the play is a teasing and voyeuristic fantasy where speculation, and transference of desire onto half realised characters overwhelms a more honest attempt to explore the psychological motivations of their real life counterparts.

By the end of the play I found myself no wiser as to what are the real personal consequences and political implications of repressing desire for material gain, which is a shame as a deeper and more honest interrogation might have allowed us greater access to the characters, so that we might ultimately find compassion and understanding for them.

Instead, by playing to speculation and assumption and in reducing the audience to the position of tabloid voyeurs without access to more penetrating insights, ultimately, the evening shared some of the frustrations felt by an own goal.

Read our interview with Jason Charles and find out more at www.steamtheplay.moonfruit.com and www.myspace.com/steamtheplay.

Steam, by Jason Charles
Barons Court Theatre
28 Comeragh Road
Fulham
London, W14
020 8932 4747

5-10 June 2007 at 8pm

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