Brian Merriman, artistic director of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, revealed something recently about his selection criteria for new plays – he wasn’t going to include a play that was merely a coming out story, it had to be more than that. However, so universal is this peculiar rite of passage for gay people, and yet so revealing of each individual’s journey, if a fresh and inventive way can be found to challenge us to rethink this notion of adopting a gay identity, then it is well worth exploring. On that score, The Boy Who Fell From The Roof written by Juliet Jenkin, hailing from the Artscape Theatre Centre of Cape Town, South Africa, is a success. But this play is much more than that, too.

Snappily directed by Roy Sargeant, the cast of four, playing the boy, his friend, his mother and his lover, engage with the audience directly, and switch fluidly between storytelling and enactment, commentary and personification. There is also a barefoot narrator, weaving in and out, interspersing the story with interpretation and critique, which at times was teasing and comically post-modern, and other times unsettling and poignant.

I loved this show, and in particular I loved its mercurial intelligence. The eponymous Boy, Simon, played winningly by Francesco Nassimbeni, is a self-styled “brilliant scholar”, the epitome of a fiercely clever adolescent, intellectually gifted and emotionally guarded. The storyline is familiar, almost archetypal in gay male sensibility – an absent, dead father, a possessive mother, a bright female best friend secretly in love, jealous when an older “token” black man comes on the scene and steals his heart. They are star-crossed lovers, doomed not to spend their lives together. But despite the thematic clichés, I didn’t for one second feel that I’d heard it before – I was keenly curious to hear the story being told, elegiacally and tenderly, of this bright, unique child. It was also fascinating to hear how discourses on cultural and national identity, race and sexuality, were being tackled in South Africa.

A couple of scenes will stay with me a long time. The mother, beautifully played by Adrienne Pearce, in her aching reminiscence of what her child had been telling her about himself, and her agonising over what place sexuality has in people’s lives, whose business it is to know? The lover, heart-throb David Johnson, and his mesmeric invitation to the young Simon to take a leap from his clever fence-sitting and go with him into the unknown.

This is a delightful, heart-warming and ultimately poignant story, and it’s a real treat that this production made it here to the festival. When I say that this play should tour schools and be seen by young people in particular, in their droves, I do not mean to diminish it, saying it’s “just” youth theatre. It’s not at all – but it’s a play that would, I imagine, appeal directly and viscerally to teenagers, because it does not patronize in the least. I imagine it would get them thinking and feeling and buzzing about life and sexuality, about identity and love, for a long time to come. Please, see for yourself.

Venue: SMOCK ALLEY STUDIO
Dates:-MON 14th – SAT 19th MAY
Time: 8pm
Tickets: €14 (Conc €12)
Sat Matinee @ 4.30pm €10
Duration: 75 minutes