It may be only in its first year but SCENE – Manchester’s box-fresh festival of LGBTQ+ film and television – has immediately hit its stride.
Thoughtfully curated throughout, tonight’s screening is the first episode of one of 2024’s televisual highlights: the beautifully nuanced, emotionally devastating and ultimately hopeful Lost Boys & Fairies. A tale of gay adoption in Cardiff threaded through with song, it could open the doors of the hardest heart.
At second sight and on the big screen, the opening third of the short series, introducing long-time partners Gabriel and Andy as each reveals themselves in the face of the exacting scrutiny of the assessment process judging their fitness to be parents, hardly misses a beat and rarely hits a false note. The dialogue in particular is a delight, spanning the breadth from the droll to the heartbreaking.
When, in flashback, Gabriel answers Andy’s almost demure request for a kiss, his “no one’s ever asked my permission before” speaks of a lifetime of being taken for granted, and the low self-esteem that both underpins and is perpetuated by it. At the other end of the scale, potential adoptee Jake takes heart-stealing relish in quoting Gabriel’s bitter dismissal of a rival would-be adopter back at him: “But she’s a massive twat.”
The episode culminates in an exquisite sequence, set to one of the songs that Gabriel performs as a drag artist, Peter Sarstedt’s ineffably yearning 1969 hit, Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? The montage, brought together by writer Daf James and director James Kent, makes powerful and intuitive use of pop music’s power to open portals in time, crocheting together the heartstrings that knit Gabriel to his past, to Andy and, ultimately, to Jake.
Once the curtain comes down on the screening, Daf James and actor Sion Daniel Young, who plays Gabriel, are interviewed with warmth and curiosity by Gaydio’s Dave Cooper.
James readily acknowledges how Lost Boys draws upon his own life, not only in the fact that he and his husband have been through the adoption process, but also in the demons that Gabriel wrestles with, or, as he puts it: “These experiences I’ve lived in my life due to queer shame. I was not an equal growing up, there’s decades and decades of insidious trauma.”
It’s not entirely autobiographical, of course. In particular, Neverland, the club in which Gabriel performs, is the place that James wishes had existed when, as a young man, although he found “solace in the clubs in Cardiff, the music never really spoke to me”.
He continues: “Growing up, I was constantly seeing things that didn’t represent my experience.” Nevertheless, James is quick to acknowledge how, in bringing a bilingual drama about gay adoption to a mainstream time slot, production company Duck Soup and the BBC were both fully supportive. In fact, he says that “the BBC, from the beginning, pushed me further into that”.
Ultimately, it is also James, asked about his artistic intentions, who succinctly sums up the Lost Boys‘ achievement. In inviting its audience “to be entertained, to be moved, to think about things differently”, it succeeds in all of these aims.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
All imagery courtesy of Premier PR
