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Background Information
Clapham Junction is a provocative and powerful single drama written by acclaimed playwright Kevin Elyot, about the mixed experiences of several gay men during 36 hours in London, and the devastating consequences that unfold when their lives collide.
From a civil partnership ceremony to a heated dinner party, five separate stories are woven into the fabric of modern day London from school and work, to bars and clubs, during one hot summer’s night in the capital.
Though Sunday's TV play by Kevin Elyot was confused, as a gay man once beaten to a pulp on Clapham Common it felt real enough to me.
Gay drama has, unfortunately, to function both dramatically and as a representation of gay people. No one criticises, say, the vast quantity of crime drama in which heterosexuals do violence to each other, as indicative of how awful straight people are. The minute a gay man is portrayed - as in Sunday's Clapham Junction - snorting coke and making advances on a shiny young waiter on the day of his Civil Partnership ceremony, someone is going to start worrying about negative stereotypes. All gay people have in common is a certain spectrum of sexual practise; the gay experience of differs vastly across ages lines, as well as class and cultural boundaries. We are barely a demographic, really: who is to say what an accurate representation is?
Then again, how often are programmes with substantial gay content commissioned? The Telegraph's preview pointed out that while playwright Kevin Elyot might have had a substantial theatre hit in 1994 with the gay-themed My Night With Reg, he has more recently been adapting Miss Marple stories for ITV. A slot like that given to Clapham Junction is such a rare thing it's easy to see why Elyot might want to cram a lot of stuff in, but how many major plotlines can a two hour TV drama sustain without coming across as an exercise in box-ticking? Then again, a 'state of the nation' piece presumably intended to show how far we have or haven't come on a significant anniversary demands a certain conclusiveness. And inclusiveness. But was Clapham Junction any good? And is that enough to ask?
There's a fatal gay-bashing, recreational drug use, literary and media in-jokes and a great deal of sex. As an HIV-positive gay man who lived near Clapham Common for several years, was once beaten to a pulp there, had an active sex life, works in the media and dipped frequently into the well-heeled middle class milieu of much of the film, I have to say that a lot of Clapham Junction felt incredibly real. It catches the frenzy of London particularly well, and the way in which social arrangements are held together by gossamer thin threads of presumption and diplomacy. The brutally swift segue from a sexual encounter into a sophisticated social event and back again is sent up with the play's most music-hall innuendos, but to me feels right.
We presume Rupert Graves's character is HIV-positive, but it is never mentioned directly. There are only a couple of lines - someone at the dinner party presumes he doesn't go clubbing anymore because, well, "you've been ill, haven't you?" Not at all, he retorts: just like her, probably, he got bored with it. Earlier, someone else comments that he's looking well, that he's put on weight. Again, this felt entirely right to me. Aids doesn't kill people like it used to, Elyot seems to be saying, but homophobic violence does. (Yet there's a certain kind of society in which Aids remains unspeakable.) In fact, Clapham Junction is a frustrating hotch-potch of moments of similarly affecting subtlety and, at best, confusion - at worst, terrible hamfistedness. Luckily Elyot has a stellar cast who create characters far more vibrant than their screen time should allow, and despite the didacticism that shapes some of those characters.
Of the real offenders, the worst is a plotline involving the 14-year-old son of one of the dinner party couples, who is obsessed with a disconcertingly handsome man in a neighbouring council block (he is, in effect, a male Lolita). It is suggested by the boy's mother - who's unawaren of her son's infatuation - that the neighbour is a paedophile; his flat has been fire-bombed. While his parents are out, the boy forces his way into the flat and confesses he watches the man from his window, having "a fag and a wank." The man resists his advances until, finally he breaks down and, unexpectedly, the boy fucks him. There are some interesting issues here. Desire is selfish - despite his attempts at adult behaviour the boy can in no way understand the battered psyche of the older man and in an interesting but clunky inversion, it is the 'child' who is the seducer. But this is not the way to make a point about the powerful sexuality of the unvalidated, teenage (but underage) gay male. Issues that complex need their own drama, as do many that arise in Clapham Junction. What really sinks these scenes, though, is the way they're filmed. Despite the obvious sweat and seediness of the encounter, it's filmed in the glowing tones of art-house porn. ("I can smell it!" shrieks the boy's mother, brilliantly, in a when she confronts them. It is a devastating performance.)
The film ends on a duff note, too. A young black boy is teased for learning the violin. As the camera lingers on the pieces of his smashed instrument (in the rain!), we are given to understand his tormentors have turned violent. People hate difference of any kind, would seem to be the message. Yet the image is a total cliché - almost as bad as the classic 'child's toy among rubble' shot used in any number of disaster movies.
And here's a thing: there are too many penises. All but maybe one of the penis shots here are gratuitous. There's also an inescapable meta-textual unease. Clapham Junction finds Elyot at his most satirical during a scene in which Rupert Graves' character, a writer, has a piece turned down by an inattentive commissioning editor at Channel 4 (in favour, as we learn later, of a new version of Howards End). The gay thing, he tells Graves's character, has been done. Couldn't he make the piece a bit more... Gary Glitter? Elyot seems to be indicating the constraints he feels he's under. (Gary Glitter, in essence, is what we get - the paedophilia storyline which sexes up the play's second hour.) Stranger still is the echo of Maurice (another Merchant Ivory EM Forster adaptation, and groundbreaking in its depiction of a cross-class gay relationship and happy ending). James Wilby played the title role and, here he's married but encounters Rupert Graves (the gamekeeper Maurice "goes wrong" with) during a spot of after-work cottaging. Obviously Maurice, a canonically great piece of writing is infinitely more sophisticated than Clapham Junction, but then Maurice does not have - or attempt to second-guess - an audience, nor does it carry the burden of any kind of social duty. But why seemingly flag it up in such a powerful way?
Elyot has, it seems, given himself an impossible task. Or rather, Channel 4 has: over two or three nights Clapham Junction would have had room to breathe. Instead, they offer up a paltry handful of programmes and have the cheek to call it a season, giving lip-service only to their public service remit. However good it is in part, Clapham Junction is confused, and will have confused its audience. But it can't escape the spotlight that exposes its weaknesses.
This resounding and, I'd hazard, entirely healthy lack of interest could - in the words of a friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous because he's just a great big Tinky-Winky - probably be ascribed to the fact that 'a drama all about being gay, whatever that means, is as interesting to me as, I'd imagine, a drama all about being heterosexual is to you.' Couldn't put it better myself, darling.
Whatever: Clapham Junction was terribly out and proud and pleased as punch with its rampant gayness, its wobbly bits and its lingering close-ups of sweaty naked male flesh being pleasured in the fetid heat of a London summer. And boy was it smug about the way all the implausible storylines were tied so tightly together, like an orgy of fetishist Gordian knots.
And, my, but didn't it also enjoy provoking us with the subversive storyline in which the admirably restrained paedophile was (eventually, against his will - poor pederast!) anally seduced by the world's least convincing 14-year-old. I'm a huge fan of (22-year-old) Luke Treadaway, but seriously - how many 14-year-old boys have pecs?
The acting was first class (apart from the women; there's only so much even Samantha Bond or Phoebe Nicholls can do with a bad part) and honourable mentions in dispatches go to Rupert Graves, as the jaded Robin Cape (and I think there's probably a Batman joke in there if we look - ooh! - hard enough), and to Paul Nicholls (no relation to Phoebe, I think it's safe to say), as the buff homophobe/psycho, Terry, because it really wasn't Nicholls's fault that his character lacked any motivation for beating up the men who picked him up, though obviously it must have had something to do with that loving - yet obviously sinisterly so - grandmother.
I have no idea how writer Kevin Elyot managed to get away with a collection of female characters so pathetically stupid and loathsome that the film came across as unilaterally misogynist.
However, if one was forced to make a judgment on contemporary homosexuality merely by having viewed Clapham Junction, then you'd still be left thinking that 40 years of legal rumpy-pumpy hadn't amounted to much, that being gay was a relentlessly fraught, thoroughly fun-less, loveless and soulless sort of business, and that all gay men are fundamentally defined by their sexuality, when even a dull hetero woman like me knows that's not the case.
In this respect Clapham Junction felt cliched, old-fashioned, emotionally stunted (it was a shame that one half of the handsome, happy, freshly civil-partnered gay couple didn't consider their wedding day might not be the best occasion to poke the hired help, though I suppose love, respect and fidelity aren't very sexy bedfellows) and therefore, one would hope, very far from representative, much less a fitting 'celebration'.
Related Pages: The Work
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Copyright: © 2000 - 2008, Adrian Skeates
This Page created: 26 January, 2008
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