Beautiful Thing review: One of the funniest, most uplifting and wonderfully optimistic queer love stories ever

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing remains one of the funniest, most uplifting, and wonderfully optimistic queer love stories ever. And as seen through a queer black lens in this latest production at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, it’s vibrantly alive as a story set in the past which very much rings true today.

Taking place in 1993 on London’s Thamesmead council estate, Harvey’s boy-meets-boy saga has a simple premise. Bullied at school, teenage Jamie finds solace in The Sound of Music, Hello magazine, and his single mum Sandra, who’s tough but loving. He also lusts after next-door neighbour and classmate Ste, who has an abusive father instead of an adoring mother and uses football as an escape.

Fleeing his dad’s fists, Ste ends up top-to-tailing in Jamie’s single bed and discovers his sexuality. As Sandra puts it in one of Harvey’s many brilliant bits of dialogue, the boys are soon doing “70 minus one” in a relationship that is never going to be plain sailing. Not on a council estate in the early 90s, nor today when homophobic attacks are on the rise. And nor, in director Anthony Simpson-Pike’s new slant on the material, in the black community.

But the play is predominantly a comedy that sings with joy and hope. If you cry at the end, and I defy you not to, it’s because the ending is a gloriously happy one. As Harvey himself notes here the message is that maybe things will be OK for Jamie and Ste and it’s a message that never goes out of fashion.

And Beautiful Thing never loses its lustre. It’s been revived many times over the last three decades and this one feels especially fresh and new. Simpson-Pike obviously loves the material and he’s well-served by a terrific cast.

Stepping in for Joshua Asaré after he was forced to withdraw for personal reasons, Rilwan Abiola Owokoniran is an adorable Jamie. Whether grinning under the beanie that Ste has bought him, impersonating Christine Cagney, or trying to kick a football about, he’s a sunny soul to whom you only want good things to happen.

Raphael Akuwudike is a nuanced Ste whose emerging queerness is delicately portrayed. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Scarlett Rayner is hilariously brash as Leah, another neighbour who is obsessed with Mama Cass. In any other show, she’d be a scene-stealer but everyone here is working at full pelt, including Shvorne Marks as Jamie’s sassy mum and Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge as her frightfully right-on suitor Tony.

A joke about Tony’s gravy-brown Volkswagen Camper is a zinger in a script that’s full of them. But the hilarious jibes and rib-tickling references to Bob’s Full House and Autumnal Shades tissues are always rooted in the characters. Written from the heart and as heartwarming as theatre gets, Harvey’s masterpiece is truly a thing of beauty.

Beautiful Thing is at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, until 7 October, Leeds Playhouse from 18 to 28 October, and HOME Manchester from 31 October to 11 November.