Douglas Carter Beane’s off-Broadway play is a not-so-serious attack against the idea that no Hollywood leading actor who wants to remain such should ever admit to homosexuality. This was a common idea in 2006, when The Little Dog Laughed opened in New York (to be nominated for the Tony Award for Best play), and it is still unquestionably common now - even though on the other hand, as somehow cheekily noted in the programme of this production at the Garrick Theatre, you can win an Oscar if you are a straight man playing a gay one (see Tom Hanks, Sean Penn). In fact, still today, it is always and undeniably with impressive fierceness that even long-time hyper famous Hollywood male stars deny any temptation or experience of ‘the love that dare not speak its name ’.

Mitchell, the protagonist of Beane’s play, is not yet one of those hyper famous guys, but he is trying to become one, with the help of his loud dominatrix agent, Diane ( ‘Diane solves problems ’). Unfortunately, during a working trip to New York, Mitchell’s penchant for rent boys risks landing him in a proper relationship, with attached coming-out frenzy, when he meets clean-faced prostitute Alex, himself in heterosexual denial, and therefore the self-declared boyfriend of a young woman, Ellen. As Diane tries to purchase Mitchell the role of his life (buying the rights to a play about a homosexual couple, of course, to make it into a movie), his feelings enter in obvious and very direct conflict with his ambitions: which will win?

The representation of Los Angeles media people being put to the test by misfortune while they dine out on salad in New York must be one of American playwrights’ favourite sports, and why shouldn’t it be, when it is always so amusing to witness. Diane, played at the Garrick by a statuesque Tamsin Greig, is your most classic cynical devil in a silk blouse, capturing everything we love to hate when we read cheap magazines to see disgraceful pictures of the glitterati. She does not so much take herself or her job seriously, but she is alarmingly aware that the world surely does, and she finds it delightfully empowering. It is hard to really know how true to life Diane is, but unless you work for Hollywood you will not be interested in this, because the important thing is that she is one of the best examples of her species as we know it from books and movies and plays.

Mitchell is quite another proposition. Rupert Friend takes a while before adjusting, and relaxing into his character, who is self-involved to the point of distraction - it remains unclear whether this was Beane’s intention, because the play, for all its malign rebukes and back-stabbing sarcasm, lacks the detached precision of Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis’s bonfires of the vanities. Mitchell’s rather whining complaint that his sexual preferences are the only obstacle keeping him from a membership of the most privileged club of Americans (white, male, Protestant, heterosexual) asks to be taken at face value, but it feels, to steal Ellen’s words, quite too much ‘Baby Jesus in a manger’. The relationship between Alex and him, which evolves through a series of getting-almost-naked scenes (I should imagine it is out of necessity, not choice, that Alex is made to wear slip-on shoes), never quite takes off, perhaps due to lack of chemistry between the two actors, perhaps due to the fragmentation of the first act, perhaps due to how the title of Most Emotionally Involved Person keeps shifting between the two of them - and this kind of story, which is clearly borrowed from that same Hollywood blockbusters that Beane sets out to despise, needs a Most Emotionally Involved Person in order to exist for the audience.

The element of this production which redeems all its weaknesses and gives substance and breath to some otherwise slightly tenuous moments is Tamsin Grieg. Greig towers above her client and his ‘little friend ’ (sometimes literally so, thanks to killer heels and Jamie Lloyd’s fortunate staging decisions), but she takes the audience as her confidant, letting us eavesdrop on her phonecalls and sharing her thoughts on ‘gold bamboo chairs ’ at awards ceremonies. She does not necessarily have a monopoly on the best lines (at one point, on Alex refusing his offer of a drink, Mitchell remarks:  ‘Why, has life suddenly become beautiful? ’), but nobody delivers them as penetratingly as her. The whole evening only really gets going when, in the middle of the first act, she walks in on Alex and Mitchell - as if in that moment she sparkled magical comedy power on them, setting them on, finally, at the right pace.

The satire might remain a bit blunt, but then again the issue at hand is arbitrarily raised to an importance it probably does not really have: it is banal to point out that Mitchell is, after all, very much making a choice, and that it is difficult to pity someone who wants to be rich by playing in Hollywood movies because he has to extend his lies a bit further. If it was enraged indignation for Mitchell’s dilemma that Beane was after, I am afraid that it will be almost impossible to muster for most of us - watching Mitchell taking his decision, I suddenly understood Wallace Shawn’s lack of sympathy for those who lament the loss of the cherry orchard. Nonetheless, there is fun to be had here, and some memorable dialogue, and of course the pure joy of having Greig telling us all about how one time the dish (almost) ran away with the spoon.

Till 10 April 2010