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Writer Luke Hereford, director Izzy Rabey and actors Reece Connolly and Geraint Rhys Edwards bring an untold queer love story to the stage with the theatre production of Nice Things. Amy Ford spoke to all four, ahead of the play opening in April.

Luke Hereford (Nice Things writer/producer): A breakup inspired this play… like all the best things. I mean, not entirely – it’s spurred on by a breakup. I did kind of write it in a post-breakup rage, but it’s become much more than that. I feel like there’s loads and loads of plays like this – domestic, two-handed relationship plays – but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one about nonbinary people. So that’s kind of what I wanted to do.

Izzy Rabey (director): So often, queer plays are set against a straight world. What makes this play so different is it’s about queer issues within a gay world. For me, that makes it really special and refreshing, because so often our stories are pitted against heteronormativity, and that’s not what this play is.

Geraint Rhys Edwards (actor): Not that this play was ever going to be preachy, but I think people who are cis, and who aren’t from a queer community, may think this play will be preaching about how to be, you know? But it’s not. It’s just about real life – heartbreak, and a journey through coming out – and it’s honest.

Izzy: For me, the breakup scene [in Nice Things] is extraordinary, both in terms of the writing, but also how these two perform. There’s something so real about it. As a director, I’m so sucked in to the chemistry between these two as actors – it’s so exciting to watch. They’re really screaming at each other at one point, and then it’s really quiet. It’s like an orchestral piece of a breakup, and I really see it like a piece of music, which makes it really beautiful.

Reece Connolly (actor): The audience have to be very engaged and very attentive and put a lot of work in as well, in terms of making their own assumptions and looking at where we are in this relationship. At the same time, it doesn’t necessarily matter if they don’t know exactly, because the play has a sort of dream logic to it. It feels sometimes like we’re watching a montage play out in real time, and we’re looking back retrospectively on this relationship. It has a chronology all of its own. I think that will be really interesting for an audience to watch… and for us as performers, obviously it’s like, here we go!

Luke: I’m also a drag queen, so I have my foot in the door of that part of the queer culture in Wales. I think it’s very rare that those that the queer scene meet the artistic scene, within Wales; I don’t really know any other nonbinary Welsh theatre makers, apart from Juliette Manon. In the Welsh artistic scene, there’s not really any queer work happening, with the exception of great things in cabaret. It would be really lovely to see the Sherman taking a chance on a main stage queer musical made by some Welsh queer artists.

Nice Things: A Queer Love Story opens in the Pleasance Theatre, London (Wed 1-Sat 4 Apr) and is then at The Wardrobe Theatre, Bristol (Mon 13 + Tue 14) and Porter’s, Cardiff (Wed 22-Sat 25).

Tickets: £10-£14. Info: London / Bristol / Cardiff

words AMY FORD

The film’s official synopsis says: “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”

The fourth volume of certified national treasure Alan Bennett’s diaries finds him, as the title of the third volume put it, keeping on keeping on: still writing, still reading voraciously, and spending his spare time enjoying lunch invitations, attending plays and exhibition openings, and pottering around gardens and antiques shops. He admits not knowing “what ‘memes’ are or what ‘skanky’ means” and expresses bafflement at writers “pissing away every thought on a tweet”.

But our foremost man of letters is not your average grumpy old pensioner (how many pensioners can offer an illuminating dissection of Love Island or say they’ve been invited to participate in a Morrissey video?), and he’s eager not to be pigeonholed as merely “a chronicler of the toasted teacake”. Hence the frequent ruminations on sex, the startling declaration “I’ve always found amphetamines delightful” and the admission that he’s always tempted by “banal observations” in parish church visitor books to write “Boring as fuck” like a naughty schoolboy.

Bennett remains for the most part a mild-mannered, sensitive observer of life, coming closest to embracing the rage age on the subject of politics; Brexit is branded “cowardice” rather than courage, Trump is a “lying and bellicose vulgarian”, and the rhyming slang for Jeremy Hunt fits.

He’s also facing up to the indignities of his advancing years – whether the fact that “one’s ears get larger and one’s dick gets smaller” or shitting himself while shopping in Camden and having to go to old friend Jonathan Miller’s house to borrow an emergency pair of underpants.

Bennett’s diary entries have often been musings on the past, but his reflections are increasingly melancholy and poignant, prompted by deaths, funerals and memorial services. Now in his nineties, he frets about leaving work incomplete, laments getting rid of books he knows he will never get round to reading, and gloomily contemplates the prospect of spending his last few years “housekeeping and putting my life in order”.

“What is hard to take is how unsurprised people would be at one’s death, the only surprise these days being that one is still alive”, he writes ruefully. Hopefully Enough Said isn’t the full stop its title implies – but if it is, it’s a wonderful way to bow out.