It is always exciting to go to a brand new venue and see actors you have enjoyed before in excellent productions, especially in fresh reworking of a ground breaking play. So it was a pleasure to visit the brand new Turbine Theatre under the railways arches next to the swish new redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and see Matthew Needham and Daisy Boulton in a new reworking of Harvey Fierstein's acclaimed Torch Song Trilogy. Matthew Needham was outstanding at Chichester Minerva last year in Mike Bartlett's play C**k and later in the superb production of Summer and Smoke. Boulton I saw in her RADA graduation year in 2013.
Fierstein has taken his 1982 collection of plays Torch Song Trilogy in which he also starred and edited them into a three act play under the title Torch Song. While they deal with the same characters at sequential stages of the central character, Arnold Berkoff's life, they each have a different style of presentation . In the first, The International Stud, we see Arnold as a drag queen Virginia Ham, and in gay clubs seeking love and friendship where he meets Ed but it is staged in a series of monologues mainly spoken directly at the audience with virtually no interaction between the characters. In the second, Fugue in a Nursery, the action between the two couples, Laurel and Ed, and Arnold and Alan, takes place on a giant double bed in a series of short revealing cross talking exchanges that don't quite ring true. As Arnold says "I wanted a husband, he wanted a wife". But in the third, Widows and children first!, he has written it almost as an American sitcom situated in Arnold's Manhattan two bed flat.
