Review: The Code

“This entire town is a cesspool, darling. Beautifully lit, well-appointed, but a cesspool nonetheless.”

Those opening lines directed straight at the audience by stage and screen icon Tallulah Bankhead set the scene for Michael McKeever’s dark, witty, searingly honest expose of the hypocrisy of golden age Hollywood.

As the programme cover for The Code says: “In Hollywood being yourself is the most challenging role of all.”

Trigger warning: if you’re not obsessed with the old-time movie greats - Crawford, Grant (Cary not Hugh), Garbo, Gable, Bankhead and Haines - then the play may glide past you like a silent pageant. It helps if you’re queer or an ally too.

Tracie Bennett is flawless as Bankhead - an 'out' lesbian who’s not averse to giving oral sex to male movie stars. Bennett perfectly captures Bankhead’s contradictions - a bitchy bravura performer whose frailty and fear of failure lie barely concealed. She’s a fighter not a victim, she tells us.

John Partridge, as the ex-star Billy Haines, now a successful interior designer, is brilliant as the angry, resolute, open and troubled disrupter. He’s a multi-layered character: dumped by the Hollywood system for refusing to marry a woman - any woman - and ditch his long-time boyfriend.

He’s determined to make the future better for gay actors. Nick Blakeley is a truly despicable Henry Wilson - an agent who notoriously groomed pretty young male wannabe actors, had sex with them, and abandoned them when a newer prettier model came along.

And Solomon Davy makes up the cast quartet as just such a closeted gay ingenue, with a secret boyfriend artist at home. The crux of the story is how he chooses between his true self and love or a successful career in the movies.

Fuelled by cocktails and cigarettes, the foursome delight, shock and educate us across 90 minutes of action, played in real time before they go off to a movie director’s dinner.

Bennett is at once languid, sexy, terrifying, decorous, outrageous and with a guttural laugh like some dirty old man - she amuses and enchants us. Blakeley’s agent is just totally vile, full of knowing he’s right and hiding his self-hatred. There’s a blood-freezing moment where he appears accidentally to tell Bankhead she has not been cast in a film version of Glass Menagerie - oops she didn’t know, and oops he may have done it on purpose.

Davy, as Chad the newcomer, is the rather dumbass outsider, with gorgeous looks and what Wilson defines as star quality, His life choice is all the harder for this. McKeever delves into how difficult - sometimes impossible - it is to be truly who you are - impossible and rewarding too,

In the programme notes he fears that little has changed in Hollywood, but he doesn’t end the play on a downer.

We’re told at the play’s finale that what in life may be your burden can turn into an anecdote, a memory and might - just might - be someone’s salvation in the future.

A beautiful thought in these troubled, phobic times.

The Code is at Southwark Playhouse (Elephant) until 11 October.