Exhibitionists review: New King’s Head Theatre has huge potential
A new London theatre! Hurray! Why isn’t there more chatter about this?
This 200-seater, six-storey proposition in Angel has shiny pink paint, exposed brick walls, neon lights and a late-night cabaret space. You can reach out and touch the old King’s Head Theatre (within the pub of the same name) from the front door of the new space. The old pub theatre ran for 53 years, heralded the beginning of Hugh Grant’s career, and staged performances by Joanna Lumley, Dawn French, and many more. It was a bastion of UK fringe theatre.
After securing government funding and putting in ten years of hard graft, the new King’s Head is the good news amid closures (Above the Stag), and savage Arts Funding cuts across the capital (Hampstead Theatre, the Donmar, The Gate.) It frankly seems too good to be true: but here it is.
The theatre’s inaugural production, about four high society gays who oscillate around the San Francisco arts scene and question monogamy and open relationships, isn’t the show-stopping opening the theatre would have loved it to be. It is too heavily reliant on cliched depictions of queer men, and the conversations around relationship styles too often feel trite and unimaginative, reliant on recycling predicted narratives.
Writers Shaun McKenna and Andrew Van Sickle’s language is too often didactic and passive-aggressive, explaining broad theories about relationships rather than involving them in a believable story about the characters.
The comedic moments rarely feel much more genuine, or particularly funny, spare a few lines further on that get real laughs. “You’ve come dressed as The Great Depression,” Jake Mitchell-Jones’s Mal hilariously barks at Rolando Montecalvo’s Rayyan, the two younger gays who feel disdain towards their partners for sleeping around.
The characters are all too closely sketched, and not specific enough from one another, to allow us to invest properly in them, becoming a homogeneous blob of elite gay stereotype. It doesn’t help that you’re often leaning forward to see the stage, the angle of the seating not quite severe enough to allow for a clear view.
The farcical set up, where warring couples end up in the room next to one another in a motel, feels indebted to Noël Coward’s Private Lives, which is no bad thing. With The Show That Goes Wrong and its various iterations, and the endless re-runs of Noises Off, farce is en vogue. But the tone is too uneven; some fighting scenes that almost glamorise domestic violence are pretty problematic.
Exhibitionists feels 20 years out of date, which is a shame for a theatre that is thrillingly contemporary. There are more nuanced stories to tell and I’m excited to see this theatre tell them.
Exhibitionists plays at the King’s Head Theatre until 10 February