Big Daddy and Young Theo. Sounds like a wrestling match between Shirley Crabtree and a bookish Etonian. And in a sense it is.
Only, the former is a butch businessman whose hotel-hopping lifestyle can best be described as convention by day, unconventional by night as he entertains Grindr hookups with a briefcase full of sex toys.
While the latter swaps dry textbooks for kinky “rug-time stories” about asexual microbes and giant earthworms. To paraphrase Captain Spock: It’s sex, Jim, but not as we know it.
However, Glenn Chandler’s amusing hour-long script for his own Boys of the Empire production company is anything but a tale of jock straps and cock traps. In fact, it’s much more tender and playful and (surprisingly, given the subject matter) sweet as the oddest of odd couples drop their guards and trade blows of a non-sexual and non-physical nature.
Blows about personal tragedy, blows about longing for intimacy, blows about secrets and lies which corrode the soul but in the words of John Lennon are what gets them through the night.
Clement Charles as Theo and Gareth Watkins as Greg are well cast and perform their roles with as much knowing knockabout as the title suggests. Though at times their exchanges lack the menace of what you would expect from a hookup between two mismatched strangers.
The plot twists are unexpected and comical and drive the narrative towards a parting-of-equals finale in which the audience like the characters are left wrestling with the question “Whose the daddy?” The answer to which, as Clement Charles reminded us after the curtain call, is “mum’s the word”.
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