Theatre review: Jock Night

Not quite a verbatim play but apparently based on interviews with Manchester's LGBTQ+ community (well... Manchester's G community, anyway,) Adam Zane's Jock Night takes place over six months in the bedroom of 45-year-old Ben (David Paisley,) who's been a fixture of the city's gay village for decades and is still very popular on the scene - he's entered his Daddy phase, although he's not particularly happy with people calling him that. He, the acidic Kam (Sam Goodchild) and muscle jock Russ (Matthew Gent) have been fuck-buddies for a while, usually finding others on the apps to join them. On the night we meet them, they're joined by two new faces: At the start of the evening likeable and naïve AJ (Levi Payne) has to duck out early after the cocktail of drugs the older men are used to proves too much for him.

He's replaced by minor porn star Simon (George Hughes, who's what would happen if the two moustache gays from I Kissed A Boy had a baby.) A couple of months later Simon has moved in, and he and Ben are trying to have a monogamous, sober relationship.

But Simon may not be living up to the demands he’s imposing on his new partner, and Kam tries to warn Ben against taking risks with his sexual health. Like a lot of recent fringe gay plays, Jock Night is largely about chemsex and sleeping around, and the self-destructive culture of a lot of modern gay men that puts added pressure on an already damaged community. It also deals a lot with ageing, and in a story that’s more or less outside of my own experience, what I could most identify with in Ben was the disconnect between someone of my generation who grew up under the constant shadow of AIDS, and a younger generation with an entirely blasé attitude towards it.

Zane’s tone is tragicomic though, so for the most part the age differences are flagged up in awkwardly funny clashes of pop-culture references – Ben never seems to learn that the middle of a sex party isn’t a great time to introduce a Victoria Wood quote, while when Kam is off his face he tends to relive favourite classic Coronation Street plots. The one-liners are undoubtedly the most successful element of Zane’s play (which he also directs,) and elsewhere the conceit of merging the interviews of a variety of men into just five characters does put a strain on the narrative, as does the imposition of a six-month time frame on events, making some of the developments feel incredibly rushed.

It particularly affects the character of Simon – it would take a much more experienced actor than Hughes to square the amount of times he moves from victim to controlling villain and back again, while the reasons behind the abrupt end of his porn career are confused – at one point it’s implied he couldn’t perform, later that he behaved inappropriately. The final time jump takes place over a matter of weeks but sees the characters acclimatised to a vast amount of plot developments in that time, and by this point the permutations of relationships between the characters feel almost arbitrary (although this does result in the evening’s best line: “It’s not a throuple, it’s a threlationship.”) On the one hand Jock Night does an admirable job of balancing witty one-liners with more serious concerns, like a real anger over the lack of gay sex education in schools and the availability of PrEP. On the other it doesn’t necessarily make for consistent characters or story.

Jock Night by Adam Zane is booking until the 11th of November at Seven Dials Playhouse (formerly the Tristan Bates Theatre.)

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Dawn Kilner.