London offers some of the world’s best theatre and musicals. And there is no better time to go!  It was announced recently that London is officially cheaper than New York to inhabit and visit for the first time since 2002. Ken Kelling, Director of Communications for Visit London said:   “There has never been a better time to visit London. It is now 25 per cent cheaper for an American to come to London than it would have been last year.”

Of gay interest, what’s considered to be the first great play by the great and notorious English gay playwright Joe Orton has recently returned to London’s theatreland. Entertaining Mr Sloane, showing at Trafalgar Studios now  to 13 April, was first performed in 1964 and later made into a film.

The eponymous Mr Sloane is a young, beautiful, psychopath and con man who is persuaded to become the lodger of Kath, a lonely middle-aged landlady with designs on him. Further trouble comes his way when Kath’s elderly father Kemp recognises him as a man wanted by the police for murder, and with the appearance of Ed, Kath’s powerful but conflicted brother, who is also attracted to him. The manipulative brother and sister eventually agree on a deal….

Joe Orton’s extraordinary artistic and private life (he was 34 when he was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by Kenneth Halliwell, his lover of sixteen years, in 1967) was the subject of Prick Up Your Ears, a biography by acclaimed American author John Lahr, later adapted into the film starring Gary Oldman. In a short but prolific career lasting from 1964 until his death, he shocked, outraged and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies.

PLAGUE OVER ENGLAND is another show getting some great reviews!  On 21 October 1953, John Gielgud — the dream-voiced Shakespearean star of his generation, and knight of the realm — walked into a public lavatory off the Fulham Road. There, he exchanged a few nods and prods with a young man who winked at him — and triggered Britain’s highest profile prosecution for homosexuality since Oscar Wilde.

In Plague Over England, the entrapment of Gielgud by a “pretty policeman” is the centre of gravity for a play that swoops across the gay underworld of Fifties London — from the bushes of St James’s Park strewn with guardsmen to the Whitehall clubs where the crackdown on this “filth” is planned.

Finborough Theatre – now thru  May 16th

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