A Plague Over England: Review. Where's the cock?

At long last I got to see Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague Over England last night, his account of Sir John Gielgud’s arrest and conviction for cottaging in the witchhunty 50s. London's Duchess Theatre is a perfect venue since it looks like a mouldering 50s wedding cake itself or something on Miss Havisham’s spider webbed banqueting table, and even as a young child I imagined her hymen as a tatty net curtain in need of laundering. Last night I dreamt of 50s dust motes dancing in my lungs and men’s pee patches left or right of the fly. It’s always best if I keep my fantasies under rein.

The play itself has a fustiness that works well as atmosphere, less so as 21st Century theatre. In its way it’s as prim and proper as its Home Secretary: we see men’s backs at urinals, furtive glances, baggy pressed trousers. Everyone speaks elliptically – a script made up of “…” and “…”: politicians and lawyers allude to grave and unnatural offences, all perfectly realistic I’m sure. What’s never mentioned is the problem here: cock. Clothes and language collude in veiling the thing that is the cause of all the fuss. Where is the cock?

De Jongh would do better to strip all his actors (and Celia Imrie as Sybil Thorndike and another) and have them naked upon the stage. This would import a timeless element in the 50s nonsense and strengthen undermining absurdity. While we do not know precisely what Gielgud got up to in the lav, I would have him stroking the cock of the “pretty policeman” (as a pig agent provocateur was called) and perhaps sucking it too – again, this may not be realistic (because all Gielgud had to do was look invitingly at the copper to get arrested) but it would underline his sexual needs. At the moment he just seems a bit frisky and fancy-free, a bit libido-lite when he’s not quoting Shakespeare or trying to be Oscar and fannying around.

An act of cock-mouth sex would also have the effect of upsetting most of the grey pube theatre critics in the audience who are no less homophobic than the grey flannelled fools on the stage. It would flush out the creased and carbuncled swine - and yes, I mean you, cunty of the Sunday Times.

I would have songs and dancing, off-stage videos screening porn – gay and straight – and when Mrs Thatcher is elected Tory leader I would have her emerge naked in a strap-on dildo as a mark of power, her new shadow Cabinet ministers (all wearing Gielgud masks) stroking it half admiringly, half fearfully. In the ignorant world de Jongh focuses on, cock is power. The fuss he dramatises is simply about compromised perceptions of cock and the prevailing fantasies of the time.

Michael Feast makes a pleasing Gielgud in miniature, his voice has something of the “silver trumpet muffled in silk” of the original: he is a surface creature, all whimsy, gaiety, ciggie smoke and signet ring on pinkie. He is not in the least sexual. The multiple roles the actors play confused me a bit: you wonder whether Steve Hansell’s homophobic copper is jail bait when he reappears as a gay opportunist – in fact not. The alternating split stage sequence where Gregory and Terry make love while the Home Sec dreams of a queerless world doesn't work: what we needed was a graphically sexual interlude - real erections, culminating in orgasm - to remind ourselves why we go to such lengths to have sex in the first place. It's all so ordinary and universal. So average.

Worth seeing, however. Click here to book.