A gap year with surprises
My Dad’s Gap Year Park Theatre ★★★✩✩
ONE OF the most satisfying of plots is when prejudice is overcome by understanding, don’t you find? Hollywood loves them which is probably why they are also instantly recognisable. So when Tom Wright’s new play opens with an alpha-male dad Dave (Adam Lannon) and his shy, gay son William (Alex Britt), you settle down for something familiar.
William is educated, conservative with a small c, and shy. His dad Dave is a feckless waster and alcoholic, the kind of dad for whom sons should be a chip off the old block. Yet, just when you think we’re in for a play about a bigoted, straight, alpha male bloke accepting his son’s sexuality, it turns out that Dave, a hard drinker who one can easily imagine being restrained on an EasyJet flight, is actually a bit of a metrosexual.
More than that, when he whisks William off to Thailand for some father/son bonding, and to encourage his repressed offspring to have fun and indulge — literally —in gay abandon, Wright’s plot confounds expectation. Because just as William falls for jet-setting architect Matias (Max Percy), Dave becomes involved with Mae (Victoria Gigante), a Thai trans woman. And suddenly it is the gay son who has to do all the acceptance.
In what feels like a missed trick, Wright acknowledges the unexpected turn of events, but doesn’t really explore it. Instead, the plot circles around square William’s new-found, drug-fuelled hedonism, and his Dad’s serial broken promises to Mae to give up the booze. Meanwhile, Rikki BeadleBlair’s simply staged production, which is performed on a prop-less white plinth, has to accommodate the character of Cath, Dave and William’s wife and mother respectively, played by former EastEnder Michelle Collins.
Collins was last seen on this stage in Stewart Permutt’s Jewishboy-falls-for-East-End-woman play A Dark Night in Dalston. As Cath, a middle-aged woman beginning to live life on her own terms, she brings a certain charisma to her latest role — but also a soapy melodrama. Her contribution feels oddly peripheral considering that she is the main box-office draw.