Teddy Ferrara review – a brave play

The play opens in a conference room where there is a circle of empty chairs. It looks as if a meeting is about to start – but the university’s Queer Student Group session has just ended, and not proved popular. Two boxes of undisturbed cupcakes sit on a table – the only adornment in Hildegard Bechtler’s stark, steel-clad set.

Enter Teddy Ferrara. He may have the name of a hero but he looks like a lost boffin. He wears a monkish brown hoodie, has a squeaky voice and expressionlessly asks personal questions, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s. Whenever he is on stage, the play compels, so completely does Ryan McParland inhabit the part. He conveys the unseeing look of someone who finds it easiest to look inward – Teddy’s exhibitionist “social” life is mainly conducted on a gay website.

Christopher Shinn’s clever play explores loneliness, belonging, gay stereotyping, victimhood and communication in a technological age. On the face of it, the play is about homophobia in an American university where students have committed suicide. Meetings to address the problem are overseen by Matthew Marsh, who is brilliant as a bogus university president, holding forth about the importance of listening. But Luke Newberry’s sympathetic Gabe raises the play’s most important idea: that generalising political correctness can itself be discriminatory.

Oliver Johnstone’s convincingly self-pitying Drew, a journalist, clinches the argument by showing how straitening the desire to be an opinion-former can be. Ideas here are more robust than the patchily self-conscious, at worst excruciating, dialogue. (It can’t be easy to perform exchanges like this: “What did I do to deserve you?” “Probably didn’t hurt that I’m sexy.”) But this is a brave, gripping, provocative play – directed by Dominic Cooke with spirit.

At the Donmar Warehouse, London until 5 December