Come Out Fighting
Drayton Arms • 17th Oct - 21st Oct
Corporal Joe Donaldson (Langley Howard) is about to discover just how easy it is for a life to be turned upside down as, in the next 24 hours, events will collude to take him on a journey far removed from the life he has known… or thought he knew. So far, the young Corporal’s life had looked fairly well mapped out given that we find him, at the start of the play, just months away from getting married to his long term fiancee and in an army career that has every possibility of seeing him rise steadily through the ranks, but this is all in stark contrast to the events that are about to unfold, and when he is instructed to escort the wayward Private Carl Jarvis (Jacob Sellers) to military Police HQ for disciplinary action, the pair are required to make a five hour car journey, during which suppressed feelings start to surface as events begin to spiral out of the Corporals control.
Private Jarvis’s crime it would seem is little more than that of being a gay squaddie, not a crime in itself given that discrimination on a sexual orientation basis has been forbidden in the armed forces since 2000, but that’s clearly a message that doesn’t seem to have filtered through to Drill Sergeant Lamb (Luke Harding), who’s acute homophobia means he is still hell bent on getting “gays like Jarvis” kicked out of the army. “The national lottery might want to fund fag entertainment, but I’m fucked if the army will”. When the opportunity to discipline Pvt. Jarvis presents itself, (Jarvis is caught working as a male stripper in his military fatigues at a gay party), Lamb manages to convince his superior Lieutenant Davies (Kevin Johnson) that action should be taken, and Jarvis’s fate is sealed. So, it would seem, is Corporal Donaldsons along with it.
With Pvt. Jarvis having already managed to cajole Corporal Donaldson into a brief, unexpected kiss, (for which he receives a punch to the face) he spends the journey relentlessly trying to push the Corporal out of his comfort zone once again. With his flirting never anything less than full-on, Donaldson’s anger slowly grows to boiling point as he is forced to confront something he actually suspects just might be true, that being his refusal to confront the true nature of his own sexuality. This is further tested with a pit-stop Jarvis convinces Donaldson to make, to visit a successful boxer called Eddie Miller (Luke Harding), a hero of Donaldsons who, it turns out, is also gay along with his manager Luke (Kevin Johnson), who it would seem Jarvis has already had a fling with. Loosing control of the situation, Donaldson simultaneously must deal with seeing everything he has built for himself come crumbling down if he is to have the potential to finally live a more honest life.
Langley Howard plays Donaldsons pent up aggression and frustration well, his inner turmoil never far from being ready to explode at any minute. Unfortunately, that his journey of self discovery must happen over a 24 hour time period doesn’t particularly work in the plays favour given the speed at which such a sizemic shift in character is expected to take place. Surprisingly, despite this, Nick Bamford’s direction shows no real sense of urgency in getting his characters there. This is in part due to the rhythm of the dialogue seldom breaking into anything like a conversational pace, the over extended pauses that seem to plague the characters exchanges make the emotional shifts in the play seem all the more abrupt. It’s also not helped by the fact that, other than the slightly more complex character of Corporal Donaldson, there is a distinctively more one dimensional quality to the other characters, which is a real shame given the interesting premise and subject mater of the play. Jarvis and Miller are depicted as little more than sex obsessed predators throughout, seeking only to fulfil their own sexual gratification at any time and at any cost. “You guys will fuck anything” Donaldson observes, and in the characters we are presented with here, he doesn’t seem to be far off the mark.
Despite its strong cast, Come Out Fighting is in need of a much more nuanced script and tighter direction to really give this exploration into suppressed sexuality and homophobia within the armed forces the story and platform it deserves.
★★★
review: Simon J. Webb
photographs: Nick Bamford