Theatre: The cruelty of grief

GUIDING STAR EVERYMAN, LIVERPOOL

JONATHAN HARVEY was recently quoted as remarking dryly that: "You do wonder what you are doing wrong when The Sun gives you a good review for a play about two 16-year-old boys getting it together."

He was alluding to his first hit, Beautiful Thing. It's fair to say that that august organ is unlikely to compromise him with an ecstatic thumbs- up for Guiding Star, his latest tragi-comedy. In one scene, Terry, the main character walks out on Joanne (Elaine Lordan), a sympathetic prostitute who has tried to befriend him when he discovers a copy of The Sun on her bed. Like all his fellow Liverpudlians, Terry was outraged at that paper's coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, with its accusations that Liverpool fans robbed dying children and pissed on them.

Joanne rejoins that it was such a long time ago - nine years, to be precise. Terry though, is still haunted by how close he came to losing his two small sons on that day and by the belief that, in the struggle to escape, he accidentally trod on and killed a child. But, in showing the damage caused when Terry (a brooding time-bomb of a performance from the excellent Colin Tierney) gives up on work, sex and life, Guiding Star looks at how survivors' guilt can easily turn selfish and become an excuse for not confronting family changes.

As always with Harvey, the texture is that of a soapy sitcom - many of the laughs here come courtesy of one of his typical gabby young females, Gina (the hilarious Samantha Lavelle), who could psychobabble for England, while blithely insensitive to the no less pressing human problems all around her. As always, too, if less centre-stage than usual, there is a strong gay theme which Harvey integrates particularly well.

This comes out in the contrast between the Hillsborough trauma and the painful death now, from cystic fibrosis, of the teenage son of the family's neighbours. In one of the play's best scenes, it emerges, as the two fathers have a drink after the funeral, that the bereaved Charlie (Jake Abraham), bel-ieves his son "was never going to be a man" and suspects that Terry's younger boy, Liam (Carl Rice) is also a "poof". You can feel rooted homophobia compli-cating his grief for a son who, regrettably, did not need rescuing from Hillsborough, being occupied with his collection of tapes of old musicals at the time.

Marni, the dead boy's mother, played by the wonderful Tina Malone as a mountainous, fag-puffing mix of puncturing mordancy and kindly perceptiveness, reverts to chippy backchat with startling alacrity after the internment, and this has as much to do with Har-vey's need to keep the script buoyant as it has to do with any alleged psychology of grieving.

There is also a rather pat symmetry to the near-disaster on a Welsh holiday which gives Terry's wife (Tracey Wilkinson) a taste of what her spouse went through at Hillsborough. But the play, even if, overall, it is uneven, teems with talent and human insight. Gemma Bodinetz's well- acted production (a collaboration between the National Theatre and the Liverpool Everyman) keeps expert control of the tone, erring only in the incidental music which makes you feel you are having your arm savagely twisted by a teary-eyed sentimentalist.