Writer: Barry McStay
Director: Matthew Iliffe
When straight couples have a baby, whether it’s planned or not, everybody congratulates them and then lets them get on with it. The assumption is that they’ll want to be parents, that they’ll have some innate ability in the role and, if they don’t, that they will be able to learn on the go.
Not so for potential adopting couples, especially if the couple is gay. The path for would-be adopters involves laying your entire lives and belief systems in front of an anonymous adoption panel. And so it is for Eoin and Zeb in Barry McStay’s Breeding, for whom adoption is the next stage in their marriage.
McStay crafts two believably different gay men in the central relationship. Eoin (McStay) is a sensible painter and decorator, determined to be a better father than his own was; Dan Nicholson’s Zeb is the product of a hippy household, which may or may not contribute to his partying, laissez-faire lifestyle.
The couple’s relationship is examined through discussions with Beth (Aamira Challenger), the social worker assigned to their adoption application. Through a combination of some clever, funny writing and intelligent plotting by McStay, we gradually see a portrait of two men who have reached the point of potential fatherhood from very different directions and at different speeds.
Initially starting as a passive mechanism for McStay to examine the lives of the two gay men in his play, Challenger’s Beth gradually comes into her own as her air of professional detachment begins to waver. Opening up after Eoin and Zeb are faced with a homophobic outburst from someone else on their parenting course, Beth and her girlfriend’s struggles with IVF deal with another side to same-sex parenting.
Throughout his work, McStay seeds a number of items critical to the play’s denouement in plain sight. Beth’s initial description of the pair as “the nice gays with the odd names”, for example, leads directly into her discovery of a fact that the couple had hoped not to disclose. It is a shame, perhaps, that a spectre of life-changing illness is not as subtly foreshadowed.
That aside, McStay crafts a solidly emotional tale. Director Matthew Iliffe elicits sterling performances from all three actors, while Ceci Calf’s glass-floored set brings an extra layer of texture to proceedings. But it is the writing that remains in the memory: a sensitive portrayal of the emotional wringer that same-sex couples must go through if they want to become parents.
Continues until 7 May 2023
