ajhlovestheatre

FOAM

by Harry McDonald

directed by Matthew Iliffe

Finborough Theatre, London – until 13 April 2024

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/foam/

This is a fascinating and important addition to the canon of modern gay plays. Foam feels highly unusual, exploring in a quintet of tense, compulsive scenes, with salty, raw dialogue, the comparatively uncharted (at least in theatrical terms) intersection between far right, neo-Nazi politics and the gay community. It’s inspired by the true story of notorious far Right skinhead Nicky Crane, recruited from a deprived upbringing into the British fascist movement while just a boy, whose terrifying reputation for violence and viciousness belied the fact that he was actually gay. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1993.

There are shadows of Schnitzler’s La Ronde in the way the sequences dovetail together, as Nicky (played with a wild intensity by Jake Richards) goes on his personal odyssey, taking in jail spells, fledgling careers in music and porn, covert sexual activity, and finally as a barely functioning husk in an AIDS hospice. The writing is brutal, muscular, rude, but more honest than it is sensationalist. Harry McDonald has created a refreshingly original work, as vital as it is disturbing.

In a delicious piece of historical-literary trolling, McDonald’s opening scene features a mythologised version of Oswald Mosley, played with an appropriate mixture of precious superciliousness and ruthlessness by Matthew Baldwin. One can only hope that evil Oswald, founder of British fascism and leader of the infamous Blackshirts, would be suitably appalled to to be portrayed as a kinky old aristocrat who requisitions under-age working class boys in public lavatories (each scene happens in a different washroom, on Nitin Parmar’s dingy but gleaming unit set), luring them with gifts, cigarettes and amyl nitrate.

Although there’s nothing to admire in the character, McDonald doesn’t invest Nicky with any self-pity. His companion (Baldwin again, impressively contrasting his earlier role with a beautiful study in tough but tender) chides him for thinking of AIDS as a punishment for his past misdemeanours. That in itself throws up an interesting moral conflict, in that the horrors of AIDS shouldn’t be visited upon anybody, yet it’s hard to feel pity for somebody who so single-mindedly terrorised anybody who didn’t fit into his pitifully narrow world view. Richards is truly remarkable, giving Nicky a brutish charisma and an inner life that the character could never begin to articulate. The constant thrum of violence is deeply troubling but so are the occasional glimpses of the dispossessed child recruited and manipulated by more sophisticated power players such as Mosley.

Matthew Iliffe directs with scalpel-like precision. Every look, covert or open, every gesture, every movement matters. There’s also a sense, dream-like, enhanced by Jonathan Chan’s lighting and David Segun Olowu’s sound design, that the whole thing is taking place outside chronological time, so that Nicky’s grim tale resonates strongly and lamentably in the present day.

There’s terrific support from Kishore Walker doubling as a young photographer and a porn actor, both realising to their cost that the controversial tattoos and snarling attitude carried by Nicky are not mere style choices. Keanu Adolphus Johnson is bracingly effective as a young Black gay clubber who takes robust steps to fight back.

Foam as a substance is malleable and prone to increasing in volume with manipulation, which is a suitable metaphor for the insidious creeping evil of neo-Nazism and the way Nicky’s strings are pulled from afar by individuals with infinitely more intelligence, influence and power. Foam the play is a deeply moral work; a warning, an acknowledgment and a howl of pain. It’s also cracking but challenging entertainment. I suspect it will have a much longer life following this Finborough premiere run.