‘Conditions on gay men aren’t laid down by the audience’

Playwright Martin Sherman and director Sean Mathias talk to Guy Pewsey about their 40-year friendship, sexuality in showbusiness and their new collaboration

PL AY W R I G H T M a r t i n Sherman and director Sean Mathias are telling me about how far they go back. “We were together, in our early friendship, around a swimming pool in Key West, when we heard John Lennon had died,” Mathias recalls. “There were all these muscle queens in Speedos, listening to opera.”

“They were leather queens,” Sherman interjects. “All they would talk about was Tosca.”

We are sitting in an Italian restaurant a few doors down from the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, where final rehearsals are taking place for Gently Down The Stream. The play is about Beau, a gay American pianist living in London, whose relationship with a younger lawyer causes him to reappraise the ever-changing nature of love.

It’s the latest of several collaborations for Sherman and Mathias, and it’s been 40 years since they were first brought together by Bent, Sherman’s seminal play about gay love in a Nazi concentration camp.

Mathias initially read it before its debut at the Royal Court, when Sir Ian McKellen was asked to feature and asked Mathias to read it over. “I read Bent because I had started dating Ian,” recalls Mathias, 62. “This was in 1978. I was 22. I said: ‘You have got to do it’. We had this dinner and Martin and Ian formed their professional relationship, and we became friends very quickly. I was a baby!”

“But you were an adorable baby,” Sherman, 80, smiles. “I adored Sean the moment I met him. There was no angst involved, or neurosis.” Later, Mathias would direct a revival of Bent and then, in 1997, a film adaptation starring Clive Owen.

Sherman moved to the UK from the US more than 40 years ago and considers London to be his unequivocal home. There were therefore, he concedes, some nerves when Mathias suggested debuting Gently Down The Stream on Broadway rather than in the West End. The play is set firmly in London but Beau’s tales from his past — a cruel father, the lovers lost to hate crimes and the Aids epidemic — seem to give New York equal billing.

“While the play is set in London there is so much that is about New York of that period,” Mathias says. “The genesis of Aids for us, for our friends, in New York. So I felt emotionally that it might feel very potent. It turned out to be an extraordinary experience.”

This is despite a certain tendency for American audiences to show their appreciation in a different way to us more reserved Brits. “The first American show I did was on Broadway, which was quite a good start,” Mathias recalls. “It was Les Parents Terribles, transferred from the National. Twothirds through act one you find out that the father’s mistress is also the son’s mistress. When that happened on Broadway it was like being in a bingo hall: all around the auditorium, it was crazy. In England? There was silence.”

Sherman asserts: “Americans love the plot. Brits enjoy the subtext.”

In Gently Down The Stream, Beau is both beguiled and distressed by the attention of Rufus, a gregarious lawyer half his age. Rufus is fascinated by his stories of what he sees as the golden age of gay life, ignoring the darkness.