Depending on the angle from which you peer at it, Michael Wilcox's Green Fingers seems either (a) to take the tired formula of courtroom drama and artfully twist it into a vehicle for exploring both anti-gay prejudice and the seamier side of Tyneside's homosexual sub-culture, or (b) to corset its sharpest perceptions of contemporary, urban gay relationships in the staid, tired conventions of courtroom drama.
The best bits of the play and of Andrew McKinnon's sparky, engaging production at the King's Head are those where mode and material manage to pull in the same direction. A fair proportion of the evening, however, leaves you aware of a strain and it comes as no surprise to learn from the programme that the play has been 'freely adapted from a script written for Granada Television'.
Nigel Hook's witty set permits no boundaries between the supposedly above-board world of law and the furtive, illegal underworld of the gay protagonists. Dock and witness-stand double as the urinals in a gay 'cottage'. Benson (Ewen Bremner), the younger of the two young male lovers, is employed by the city parks department and his passion for plants seems, surreally, to have invaded the court decor which, with its trailing greenery and rockery- like fixtures, would take quite a bit of watering.
The play, too, mischievously blurs divisions. The plot has a standard starting-point in the desire of a criminal to shield his partner from prison by taking the rap alone. The twist here is not just that both the lovers are men, and one HIV positive at that. All trim moustache, unfixed eyes and prissy blazer, Gordon (David Howey), the man who has been robbed and has brought charges, is no pure victim, but a noted corrupter of youth (Benson among them) at his lavish, talent-gathering parties. Then there is Roy Hanlon's comic, incongruously non-homophobic judge who (we learn via a clumsily introduced telephone call) is sympathetic to the defendants because he himself has a gay son.
Far too much time is spent, though, on the finicky detail of the break-in. The fact that for the police and prosecuting counsel, the couple are on trial as much for being gay as turning thieves, is conveyed in neon-lit italics, while the part of the defence counsel (a woman about to leave the law for a lesbian menage on a farm in Italy) is cripplingly underwritten.
The distinctive tanginess of the play comes through in the black-comedy scenes set outside the court. Fully at ease with the fact that there is nothing wrong in being gay, the drama has no need to conceal that some gays are 'bent' in a manner that is also richly available to straights.
In the 'cottage', for example, one corrupt homosexual is seen being blackmailed by another for information that will enable him to blackmail further non-corrupt specimens. Often, though, you feel that the flexibility of film would release the material, as in the potentially hilarious episode (only described here) when Benson, almost wholly for horticultural purposes, pays a nocturnal visit to a popular Newcastle cruising area.
Douglas Henshall is superb as his tough, wide-boy Glaswegian lover. With his widely-set, dangerously glimmering eyes, he looks like a toad who is three- quarters of the way through the change into becoming a sexy prince. He combines the charm you would need for a Bill Forsyth movie with the ambiguous edge required for the Iain Heggie plays in which he has excelled. Going down with Aids symptoms at the end and desperate to conceal these from the prison authorities, Henshall's Pringle is moving without the least recourse to sentimentality. The play has some wonderful moments, but it's a shame that so much of it remains stuck, dramatically speaking at least, in the closet.
Paul Taylor - The independent - January 4th 1991