From gaiety into darkness

IF GERARD Stembridge's new play at the Project, The Gay Detective, were really, as it almost is, a film of a Raymond Chandler novel, it would be hard to cast Philip Marlowe. The usual suspects Robert Mitchum, say, or Humphrey Bogart wouldn't do.

For, even though The Gay Detective is a self conscious journey down Chandler's mean streets, his hero has none of the hard bitten, down at heel ambiguity of a Philip Marlowe. He is that oddest of things, an innocent man, almost entirely good, played by Peter Hanly as such. And the play itself is just as odd a pastiche that is actually more serious than the original, a clever exercise in style that is also an excursion into good and evil.

Like Tom Murphy in The Blue Macushia, Stembridge uses the film noir of the 1930s and 1940s as a metaphor for social and political corruption in modern Ireland. The Gay Detective is a simpler play than Murphy's, the language less highly wrought, the allegory less ambitious. It doesn't have the same complexity of texture. But at its core is a sense of moral darkness no less profound. And the relative simplicity of the play has the advantage of making that vision entirely clear.

The play, in other words, .15 simple but not naive. It takes a well tried form a standard detective thriller and makes use of its main advantage for a writer. The great thing about detective stories is that they provide a form in which an audience can he led through a cross section of a society. Stembridge uses the investigation of a crime the murder of a TD in a gay sauna in Dublin as the excuse for sending his Garda detective sergeant, Pat, on a journey through a looking glass Ireland.

What makes this journey work as a play, though, is the fact that it is not just a social odyssey but also a sexual one. Woven through it is the detective's search for sex and love, as he goes from casual encounters to real commitment. As well as a political metaphor, the play offers a moral one, as Pat struggles to distinguish the sexual roles he plays in his undercover investigation from the realities of his relationship with his lover Ginger (Eddie Tighe).

What Wakes the play original is the way it puts these sexual and political, private and public, themes together. The Gay Detective is far from being the first Irish play to deal sympathetically with homosexual characters. But it is I think, the first to take those characters entirely for granted. What might be called gay issues decriminalisation, queer bashing staying in the closet, homophohia run through the play, but as facts of life, not as issues.

THE play is emphatically not about male homosexuality, in that it treats the state of being gay as in it self perfectly normal and morally neutral. The hero and his lover are gay. So are the villains. What the play does is simply to use gay subculture as a mirror for Irish society. Seeing it reversed in that mirror, you pay more attention to the writing on the wall.

It is important in achieving this that, when it comes to sex, the play is explicit but not literal. Sexual encounters are played out on stage, but never in such a way that they become naturalistic. And this is as important to the play's content as it is to its style. It makes you aware all the time that these sexual encounters are not just private actions, but also social performances. What the gay context does is to show us that sex is hedged around with rules and dangers that derive from the world outside. That what matters, in other words, is not whether sex is gay or straight, but whether it is human or inhuman.

To keep hold of this idea, the play needs to unfold with great discipline, and here the advantage of the writer also being the director is immense. As Pat's quest takes him deeper and deeper into a corrupt underworld of political and personal abuse, the tone of the play has to change very slowly from, light to darkness, and yet retain its formal coherence. Stembridge paces the change with great skill. More importantly, he keeps control of the degree to which the characters are stylised (most have animal names, emphasising their unreality), and the degree to which the style gives way to serious substance.

Not only does Peter Hanly's earnest, fresh faced Pat gradually take on an obsessive air, but the characters around him are almost entirely transformed. Almost, everyone starts out as a comic caricature Pat's Garda boss Bear (the superb Tom Hikey) as a harmless Inspector Plod, his lover Ginger as a fairy queen, Ginger's neighbour Puppy (Shelly McGlynn) as a scatty fag hag. But all of them become over time more real the boss a cynical bigot, the lover a dying man, the neighbour a lost woman. The effect is like that of characters slowly emerging out of a movie world into something very like a real one.

And the writing works the same way, moving from a dry, brittle wit that makes the first half hilarious to a brusque and brutal realism that makes the second increasingly uncomfortable. It is a transition that some may find hard to take. But it comes from a determination to use a command of style and humour for a serious moral purpose, a refusal of easy options that makes The Gay Detective not just a clever play but also a genuinely brave one.