A Single Man review: ‘Cold and clinical adaptation only skims the surface’

Adapting A Single Man for the stage, writer Simon Reade talks in the programme notes about wanting to get at “the heart-wrenching drama of the story”. Something must have gotten lost along the way, though, because the play is often cold and clinical when it could have been sexy and stirring.

A lot of that is down to Reade’s fidelity to Christopher Isherwood’s novel, which to me at least feels poignant but dispassionate. Much of the book’s first-person narration is repurposed for the play, so the protagonist George – a 51-year-old gay English professor in California in 1962 – is on the outside looking in at his own life.

That puts him and us as a distance that Theo Fraser Steele struggles to close. Probably because of the writing, the actor never fully inhabits a man who is haunted by his past and grieving the loss of his long-term lover Jim whilst living on the fringes of suburban Los Angeles where the neighbours refer to him as “a queer”, “a faggot” and “a misfit”.

Steele is less dour than Colin Firth was in the Tom Ford film version and he has a nice line in campy sarcasm as an Englishman abroad who doesn’t quite get America. When he’s required to cry, though, it seems more through phoney petulance than genuine emotional pain, putting the character at even more of a distance. (Another phoney note: He complains about being overweight but, when stripped to his shorts, he absolutely isn’t.)

The play, which covers a day in George’s life, is not without its pleasures. The first act is breezy and engaging as the supporting cast flit on and off stage as different characters who figure in his story. The dialogue is snappy and there’s a really touching flashback where we see Jim helping George dress for work which, right down to the handing over of misplaced keys, encapsulates the love between two people who have been together for a long time.

The second act drags in comparison. There’s a scene between George and his gal pal Charlie that goes on for far too long and serves no clear narrative purpose. Then there’s the flirtation with a student named Kenny (Miles Molan, full of energy and let’s be honest, looking great in just a towel) that should crackle with sexual tension but somehow doesn’t.

The fact that nothing comes of it is true to Isherwood’s book and in the film Ford honoured that too. But there was a heat between Firth’s George and Nicholas Hoult’s Kenny that’s absent from the stage version.

In the end A Single Man on stage is a curiosity: A queer story that skims the surface yet, unlike George and Kenny when they go for a moonlit swim in just their underwear, never mines the depths.

Rating: 2/5

A Single Man is at Park Theatre, London, until 26 November. For more information visit parktheatre.co.uk. For more great deals on tickets and shows click here.