Arts: Theatre: What do gay men really want?

Certain Young Men Almeida Theatre London

THERE WAS a West End play a few years back called Straight and Narrow which paid gay men the dubious compliment of effectively saying that they should be allowed to settle into the sort of monogamous domestic bliss enjoyed by Terry and June. It's not an option that would cause a stampede among the eight gay (or gayish) characters in Peter Gill's studiedly knowing new play, Certain Young Men. Indeed, one of the guys, who is in what is optimistically termed a stable relationship, finds himself asking: "What are two grown men doing living together, faking all the stupidities of a fake straight relationship?"

The big enigma used to be "what do women really want?". To judge from this often sharply funny and occasionally moving piece, that question is as simple as sorting out the Pope's religion compared with the ineffable mystery of what it is that gay men, deep down, really want. These are certain uncertain young men. Directed by the author on a stark, open- plan set scattered with a few chairs and props, and with all the characters remaining on stage throughout, the play hops around various difficult, wrangling relationships, laying out a tart smorgasbord of gay sadness and soul-searching.

A crack cast perform the piece with a fantastic feel for its edgy sprung rhythms but the proceedings sometimes veer dangerously close to dwindling into a mere Sloane Rangers' Handbook of Contemporary Gay Lifestyles. One character, Robert, delivers a lengthy, preternaturally witty lowdown on the underlying prescriptiveness of these apparently free times and on the misleadingness of categories. Its full of coruscating insights ("The anger of us all at being biologically sorted. Look at straight men. Most straight men are male impersonators") but it sounds as though it's being dictated for publication in Attitude magazine.

Elsewhere there is genuine drama, albeit of an oppressively nagging and chained-to-the-spot variety. Jeremy Northam and Andrew Woodall play, respectively, a gay obstetrician and a divorced bisexual whose small son seems to provide both a bond between them and a bone of contention. Andrew Lancel's character drives his ostrich-headed partner mad with his endless frettings about authenticity and the need to transcend cheap imitation ("I don't want a life. Life happens between those things"). Ironically, he winds up with Danny Dyer's brilliantly acted Terry, a straight- up-guv young chancer who has been left without a sincere bone in his body by his background of children's homes and abuse.

Starting and finishing the play, there's a relationship that makes Vladimir and Estragon in Godot look like doyens of decisiveness. These recurring vignettes seem to be unfolding in the head of John Light's Michael who, in his apprehensive, sexually charged dealings with Alec Newman's Scottish bit of rough, keeps announcing "Or...", whereupon the course of the scene takes an abruptly alternative route. It produces a dizzying, comically Cubist effect and powerfully increases the atmosphere of pained disorientation. I have to confess, though, to not finding this unvaried evening uniformly riveting. Indeed, there were moments when I seemed to be living proof that you can be beside yourself with admiration and with boredom at the same time.