Dumbledore is So Gay. Southwark Playhouse.

Robert Holtom’s delightful coming-of-age-slash-rom-com Dumbledore is So Gay had a 2020 outing at the VAULT Festival and a late 2021 turn at the Pleasance. Now at the Southwark Playhouse and boasting a slightly longer running time the piece still enchants with fresh, sharp wit, snappy direction from Tom Wright, and top tier performances.

It is 2007. Jack (an immensely likeable Alex Britt) is a permanently priapic teen whose passion for Harry Potter almost matches his lust for best friend Ollie (Martin Sarreal who takes multiple roles). Driven wild by Ollie’s Lynx Apollo, Jack daydreams of dates at Katy Perry concerts and a magical tryst in Mykonos. Real life is a rather more mundane. His schoolmates spew out “that’s so gay” as a kind of generalised insult about everything, and his homophobic dad cannot even cope with Graham Norton on TV (“he’s not gay, he’s just Irish” mum Sally reassures him).

Jack tries dating his best female friend Gemma (Charlotte Dowding also in multiple roles) with predictably grim results. Drunken kisses with Ollie promise romance but that is soon stymied by the latter’s thuggish older brother Mickey. Like many a gay boy before him Jack flunks his A-Levels, nicks £50 from his mum, hails the Megabus to London and discovers Heaven nightclub and men. A return from a weekend of frolics sees him confronted by tragedy at home. If he could go back “there’s so much I’d change, like everything” Jack muses. As luck would have it, he possesses Hermione’s magic Time Turner, which offers up the opportunity for a kind of self-directed Groundhog Day.

Second time around growing up is not much better. Ollie is still unobtainable, the football team’s bullying is as unbearable as before, mum is just as hard to talk to, and the men at Heaven are a little less palatable. Is Jack destined to be like Dumbledore, whose unfortunate fate is forever fixed by a demonic curse? Or third time round, will he finally get that dream life with Ollie he so desperately desires?

Sarreal is great, both as Ollie and as Jack’s grunting taciturn dad who “doesn’t come from a long line of communicators”. Dowding is fantastic too as a world-weary Gemma, and as mum Sally, whose delight in pointing out the many narrative flaws in Eastenders provides one of the show’s best running gags. Natalie Johnson’s set, an ethereal blue backdrop of stars etched with gold crescent moons and clock faces, provides a suitably magical backdrop to events.

Dumbledore is So Gay is a joyfully inclusive celebration of the lives of LGBT+ youth, and more broadly of humankind’s endless capacity for self-reinvention. It is also a melancholy reminder that we can rarely expect to get everything we want out of life, however much we try.

Writer: Robert Holtom

Director: Tom Wright