Two Come Home @ King's Head Theatre - Review
An emotive, raw and gripping play. A redraft or two and it will be a queer theatre classic. ★★★★
King’s Head Theatre, Islington, until 18th August.
Tickets from £10.
Rating: ★★★★
Promising to explore “the realities of being gay in an impoverished rural community and the ways guilt, rage, and love define our relationships”, Two Come Home sets up some expectations going in which are imperfectly met. The setting is evidently rural, a small, closeknit community, but Evan, the leading man, is not especially feeling that. His life challenges are much more universal - service industry work puts his head just about above water, he struggles to find more dignified work, not because of rurality, but because of a criminal record. We see some aspects of how small town homophobia impacts his life, few other gay people in town, a violently homophobic father, but little more expansion than that. This is undeniably a symptom of length.
Two Come Home is an 80 minute play and in that time manages to rush us through a compelling story with some highly dramatic, emotional and deeply human scenes, but leaves so much more unanswered and unexplored. We are told briefly that the lovers experienced addiction together, that his former lover is married with a child, he spent two years in prison… each of these things could be sensitively and interestingly drawn out into several scenes.
The staging and pace also suffer from time crunch, with quiet stage resets in the dark where an interval should be, and proportionally too much time devoted to dialogue that gives backstory rather than moves along the plot.
Billed as a “play with music”, the whole thing is accompanied by a violin, cello and singer who, while excellent musicians, add little to the play. It’s well enough scripted and acted that we do not need gently rising music to tell us when to cry. An in-character accoustic guitar solo by Evan is much more emotionally impactful, and possibly the need to accompany that sparked the idea of live music throughout.
The acting is excellent, though questionable accents and space limitations sometimes let down the emotional intensity of the scenes. Nicola Goodchild is astounding as Amy, the addicted, abused, but deeply unsympathetic, mother of Evan, desperate for her own identity outside of motherhood and wifedom. Joe Eason, playing Evan, has a fantastic understanding of physicality and acting emotions without lines.
The team on and off stage are queer, and this shines through in the understanding of queer love and loneliness. A comedic lesbian side character is deeply lonely and desperate for another queer person to socialise with her and her wife. Gay men fighting teeters between eroticisim and a continuation of a cycle of domestic abuse from Evan’s past. Realistic bodies reflect this two, a father in his late twenties mentions being fat, and is played by a fat actor who is shown as desirable and actively sexual. Despite teething problems and flaws to be ironed out, Two Come Home is a beautiful and comforting queer love story without a hint of the heterosexual gaze.
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