A ‘gay drama’? You wouldn’t call Romeo and Juliet a heterosexual drama... this is a love story
A forbidden love spanning 60 years forms part of BBC’s Gay Britannia season. MARION McMULLEN looks at how actors James McArdle and Oliver Jackson-Cohen found themselves playing lovers in Man In An Orange Shirt
How did Man In An Orange Shirt come about?
OLIVER: I got a phone call from my agents about it saying they had been tracking the script for a while and they sent it through. It’s very rare to read scripts that have something to say and I really felt it did.
It was something that needed to be heard. It was an immediate connection. It has a story that is incredibly honest and that deals with love and love that is forbidden. There is something inherently potent about that and the way it spoke to me.
JAMES: I was doing a play at the National called Platonov and I had a gap of a couple of months before my next job. I was thinking, oh good, but then my agent – the tenacious woman that she is – said ‘no, you should read this script.’
I read it and I was hooked. It wasn’t patronising. It was romantic, which I was surprised at and glad about.
What characters do you play?
OLIVER: Michael Berryman. He is a captain in the army and a middle class Englishman.
We first meet him at the end of the Second World War where he finds a badly injured old school friend and romance blossoms between the two of them.
He’s mathematical in his thinking and chooses to conform in life, so he gets married, has a child.
But as a result he is then forever conflicted because the man he loves, Thomas, keeps coming back into his life over the course of 10 years.
It creates chaos for Michael and his family. He chooses to continue on this life that’s a lie and the ripple effects are dramatic.
JAMES: I play a character called Thomas March who is an artist, a war artist. When he’s not painting soldiers, he lives a sort of bohemian lifestyle in London.
He falls in love with Captain Michael Berryman – they have this huge, whirlwind romance and Thomas falls hook line and sinker and it sort of defines his whole life. He can’t quite escape it.
Thomas is much more confident about who he is and is not afraid to be himself in a world which rejects him. Whereas Michael – unfortunately for Thomas – wants to go back on the heteronormative path and that leaves Thomas heartbroken. Thomas just continues to get sadder and lonelier.
Do you think Michael loves his wife Flora?
OLIVER: I think he does love Flora, but it’s a different kind of love. I actually spoke to Michael Samuels, our director, a lot about this. I think that he has an awful lot of respect for Flora, but in a sad way he is sort of using her. He is using her to keep this sort of fantasy alive, this fictitious life that he has built with her.
But I do actually think that it hurts, I think that is why there is the conflict. I think that if he didn’t love Flora then he wouldn’t care. I think it is because he cares so deeply about Flora, that he doesn’t want to hurt her at all, but he also doesn’t want to hurt Thomas. But of course, in turn, he is hurting both of them.
Do you think it is a love story?
JAMES: Yeah, I hope so. I was a bit annoyed when it was announced and people kept saying it was the BBC doing a ‘gay drama’, because you wouldn’t call Romeo and Juliet a heterosexual drama, you would just call it a love story. This is not a homosexual drama. It is a love story between these two men. It is just a love story that happens to be set in the 1940s, where it was illegal for them to be themselves.
How do you feel about writer Patrick Gale’s script?
OLIVER: He has a personal attachment to the story, so the writing is going to be a lot more honest, and he spent a lot of time on set which was very rare. No one told me the story about Patrick’s father until half way through filming. I then felt a huge responsibility to tell the story as honestly as I possibly could.
He showed me a picture of his father and the equivalent of Thomas on a boat in Venice and they looked really happy.
It was very moving because all of the other pictures he had shown me were his father looking very stoic and manly with his wife. It was the first thing Patrick showed me where his father genuinely looked blissful and it was so moving. Man In An Orange Shirt is on BBC2, Monday, 9pm