This Boy’s in Love – Adriano Cappelletta

This Boy’s in Love, written and performed by Adriano Cappelletta, is a ‘gay’ romance. It has been successfully performed and acclaimed at numerous national and international festivals, including the Adelaide Fringe Festival. These current performances of only two shows are essentially a return season, which is fortunate for me and others who have previously missed this highly acclaimed piece of  ‘gay’ theatre’.

I asked the ‘gay’ couple who were seated at my table at the Artspace why they had come to this show. Their answer included the same sentiments, in that they had never seen it but had heard about this piece of ‘gay’ theatre. I am stressing this for two reasons. First, that whilst this show is in the Cabaret Festival and works well within a cabaret venue, nonetheless, it is really a play (with music). Second, that we very rarely see ‘gay’ plays in Adelaide – heaps of ‘gay’ cabaret, but not ‘gay’ plays. Subsequently, it was a joy for me and many others in the audience to see and experience a play about our own Australian tribe.

This Boy’s In Love tells the story of Ado, a single 30-something ‘gay’ actor in Sydney, and his quest to find love. On this journey he encounters a number of possibilities, which all prove amusingly disappointing, until he encounters ‘the one’. That person is a Englishman, from Stratford, and is a successful lawyer. The two begin to date, which includes a hilarious night on the town, and finally leads to a wedding.

All this may seem relatively straight forward, but there is a psychological twist that gives the journey a greater complexity. Whilst desiring love, and receiving it, when it comes to the crunch Ado cannot actually say the words ‘I love you’. Ado does find love, but then can’t return it. A modern tale.

What makes this show even more delightful and impressive is that Adriano Cappelletta plays all the characters in this relatively vast display of ‘gay’ life in modern Sydney. It is a dazzling performance of great talent and skill, moving effortlessly from character to character, very often within seconds. Furthermore, Mr. Cappelletta wrote all the original songs that complement or comment on the action. A favourite was ‘Gay Zombie’, which was a hilarious, satiric song about obsessive night clubbing in Sydney. There was also the beautiful wedding song ‘Two Hands’, which whilst very brief was extremely moving.

It was the intention of Adriano Cappelletta, with his director Johann Walraven, to present a simple romance that didn’t have a ‘gay’ character as some sort of crazed victim or drug addict, who has trouble with accepting his homosexuality.  They are completely successful in this aim, as here we have a simple love story that complements an understandable and real desire for simplicity and normality. The discovery being that finding and the acceptance of love is actually not that simple. The normality of it all, the human commonality of the desire and need to be loved, and how difficult at times it is to accept love, taps into a universal issue, making this experience sublime.

Highly recommended.

Tony Knight

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