‘The Boys Are Kissing’: Engrossing And Excellently Performed

An impactful play about the foibles of queer existence, The Boys Are Kissing is a sensational modern parable. Now playing at Qtopia Sydney, this engrossing play is made all the better by a sensational cast and seriously astute direction from Gavin Roach.

The Loading Dock Theatre is the perfect setting for this tale, following two families in a regional English town after a massive scandal occurs: their sons Lucas and Samur are caught kissing on the school playground. On one side are the rather straight Sarah (Sonya Kerr) and Matt (John Michael Narres), and on the other the lesbian parents Amira (Shav Tavakol) and Chloe (Willa King).

As the couples subtly clash heads over what’s to be done, they are unknowingly supervised by two cherubs (Aisling Delahunt and Max Fernandaz) who do their best to guide the parents to what’s best for the children – all while Lucas’ 10th birthday party looms large in the near future.

It’s a testament to the penmanship of writer Zak Zarafshan that The Boys Are Kissing manages to inject an undeniably otherworldly element into an otherwise startlingly real scenario without ever feeling out of place. Perhaps it’s because much of the writing in the play feels quite raw, with the playwright clearly drawing from the frustrating contemporary discourses that surround the existence, and the existence of queer angels guiding things along the right path is a welcome reprieve.

Aisling Delahunt and Max Fernandaz are both excellent as these angels, but so too as other people in the lives of the two couples. Sometimes they take up the role of a Greek chorus, other times they are active participants – and both actors are stellar in the way they switch accents and physically embody different kinds of people in conjunction with inspired costumework, set design and lighting.

The Boys Are Kissing captures the truth behind moral panics

The most engrossing parts of The Boys Are Kissing, though, are ultimately those that touch on the interpersonal relationships between the decidedly human characters. Baked into the script is a scathing takedown of “politeness” as a way to avoid standing up for what’s right, as exemplified in the brilliant performances of Sonya Kerr and John Michael Narres.

It can be a bit hard to stomach the actions of Sarah as you watch her forsake her friend Chloe to appease a faceless board of parents who all believe two young lads kissing is an act of war on their values, while Matt doesn’t do much to stop it. Yet in this couple lies Zarafshan’s most pernicious observation about modern day homophobia – often, it comes from those who sincerely mean well and are considered “nice”, as Kerr and Narres perfectly embody.

Meanwhile, Chloe and Amira are tearing themselves apart over what it means to be visibly queer in a less-than-accepting place. King and Tavakol are excellent stage partners and deliver some of the play’s most terse, fiery exchanges with a sense of realism that was equally engrossing and upsetting – especially given how much their son Samir is clearly suffering just out of view.

That’s a large part of what makes The Boys Are Kissing so brilliant: it captures how moral panics surrounding children are very rarely about the children themselves. Instead, they are battlefields for the crooked ideologies of adults who would rather believe that heterosexuality is the norm and that their children are incapable of expressing themselves authentically.

It makes the play a particularly engrossing watch, maintaining Qtopia Sydney’s reputation for quality theatre productions. Feeling much bigger than the intimate Loading Dock Theatre, The Boys Are Kissing is well-worth seeing for its excellent performances and thoughtful commentary on a thorny subject.

The Boys Are Kissing is playing now at Qtopia Sydney.