It takes a little while to grasp the tone of Next Fall, Geoffrey Nauffts’ Broadway play which has now taken up residence at Southwark Playhouse. Opening in a hospital waiting room as family and friends cluster around awaiting news of Luke (Martin Delaney) after a traffic accident, a tapestry of family and relationship tensions and underlying religious prejudice is, initially, rather clunkily laid out.
Veering from confusingly jovial to not-quite-Avenue-Q-so-offensive-it’s-funny, Luke Sheppard’s piece takes a full first half to warm up as we slide back and forth in time to discover the genesis of Luke and Adam’s (Charlie Condou) relationship, and is largely held together by Condou’s simmering grief and frustration and Sirine Saba’s forcefully endearing pleasantness as the candle shop owning, no-nonsense Holly. Clashes over Luke’s Christian faith and Adam’s war with the idea that their relationship is somehow a sin to be struggled with somehow feel at first like tiring battles of attrition.
However, once it beds in, it transpires that Next Fall has a little more to say about the reality of faith in the modern world, and the morality of having to hide or be ashamed of your own life. Delaney pitches the exuberant confidence of someone who believes in an afterlife and a reward in heaven with someone who is wholly in love with a person that he feels the creeping, guilty need to hide from his family to heartbreaking effect, particularly at a moment in which he almost hopes that his father (the cheerfully stuck in the mud Mitchell Mullen) might be accepting of their relationship.
Though the act of actually watching the piece is made difficult by the fact that few of the characters render themselves wholly likeable at any particular point (with the exception of Holly), which can make it hard to buy into their individual struggles, everyone’s personal demons are realised in a strikingly familiar way. Rather than battling them out for an ultimate narrative conclusion, they are often fought about, pushed aside and ignored in the name of peace, of staying together, of being easier.
It is also interesting to watch the reactions of what would presumably be a largely secular British audience to writing that is very much grounded in the understanding of what it is to be and to know those who are very committed to a conservative interpretation of Christianity. Not to cast aspersions, but of those attending a play that is ostensibly about a gay relationship on a Monday night in London, conservatives (with a small c) are likely to be a minority.
Next Fall takes a surprisingly sensitive approach to this, where a great deal of British writing does not, and it sensibly handles the emotional validity of both sides, particularly at a time of grief. This actually lends it a great deal of weight, and the second half has a fully realised emotional tug as Luke’s family and Adam are forced together, to acknowledge each other. Though not massively hard hitting, it is affectingly personal at times and there is certainly always room for more discussion of faith and sexuality – a narrative often missing from British theatre.
