A case of fright or flight

As Burning Blue, a drama about gay naval pilots, touches down in the West End, Paul Taylor meets its author

When Burning Blue opened to acclaim at the King's Head last March, the press reaction inevitably focused on the fact that it dramatises a gay witch hunt in the US navy and that its author, David Greer, had himself been a naval aviator. The witch hunt is certainly the engine that drives the drama, but as Burning Blue prepares for take-off at London's Haymarket Theatre, Greer - who is still as dauntingly fit-looking as the pilots in his play - is keen to agree that the piece doesn't come across as a straightforward plea for gay rights in the military.

Indeed, the drama, which shuttles between interrogation and flashbacks, is at its strongest when charting the awkward, uncertain overlap between heterosexuality and homosexuality. One of the pair of lovers is married; the other has a long-standing (and long-suffering) girlfriend. And it's a straight lieutenant who suffers the most dramatically forceful breakdown - his grief and rage stemming not from inflamed homophobia but from the realisation that he has not been (as he had thought) the most important man in his best buddy's life. That, says Greer, is the paradox of serving in the armed forces. It depends on intense male bonding while demanding the pretence that locker-room horseplay won't shade into something more serious.

Why, I wondered, had Greer set the story up in such a way that the relationship between the two men is never consummated. Isn't that a bit novelettish and overly reassuring for people who are happier with the idea of a gay man mourning a dead lover than with the thought of him humping a living one. The playwright agrees that it makes the story more romantic. "But what it accentuates, to my mind, is the most important aspect of their relationship, which is their incredible love and respect for one another."

As far as military policy is concerned, sexual orientation should be a purely behavioural issue, contends Greer - a question of knowing when it is and isn't appropriate to express sexuality of whatever kind. What the play shows, though, by keeping the love unconsummated, is that feelings can be just as destabilising as acts in a world where, as Greer neatly puts it, "men are emasculated of their sensitive, feminine side".

It's not homosexuality, but the army that comes across as unnatural in this work. So when the interrogated pilot defiantly proclaims "I am not a professional 'gay', I am a professional naval officer - I refuse to be defined by my sexuality", the play's laudable championing of his civil rights is qualified by its scepticism about the value of serving in the navy in the first place.

Greer is the stepson of a retired admiral, and most of the pilots in his play live in the shadow of patriarchal tradition. Despite the fact that his stepfather can hardly bring himself to utter the word "Clinton", he is coming over to see the play's West End debut. His would be a review worth printing. Like Jonathan Lewis's Our Boys, another powerful anti- recruitment drive by a disillusioned ex-serviceman, Burning Blue makes you feel that it would be in the interests of the armed forces to screen newcomers not for homosexuality but for sensitivity and writing talent.

n 'Burning Blue' now previewing at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London SW1 (0171-930 8800). Opens Tuesday