Events

What's on in London: Four Play

Jake Brunger's exploration of queer relationships returns to the London stage.

Gaydar

16 Jul 2025 — 3 min read

Image credit: Rich Lakos

Jake Brunger's exploration of queer relationships, Four Play, is back on the London stage at the King's Head Theatre.

Directed by Jack Sain (who also directed the premiere production in 2015), the cast for this production is Daniel Bravo, Lewis Cornay, Jo Foster, and Zheng Xi Yong, with Jack Gibson covering.

On the night that we saw it, all the principals were in their roles:

Daniel Bravo as Michael
Lewis Cornay as Rafe
Jo Foster as Andy
Zheng Xi Yong as Pete

This is a well-directed production with strong performances. The studio space of the King's Head brings an intimacy to the production, supported by Peiyao Wang's simple but effective set design.

Brunger wrote this play over a decade ago - commissioned by the Old Vic in the aftermath of the UK's embrace of Marriage Equality. According to the programme, he's made some updates to the play to make it feel more contemporary - it's not a period piece, this is an interrogation of today's queer relationships.

There's a wry, affectionate humour that ripples through this play which helps us to connect with these characters - at a surface level.

The challenge is that queer relationships - and the conversations that swirl around them - are nuanced and messy and illogical. That's difficult to reflect in a 4-handed one-act play.

Brunger has the right intention. There is a conversation to be had about how queer people balance our heteronormative impulses against the potential liberation of writing our own rules. There is a conversation to be had about what a "successful" relationship looks like for queer people, the expectations we place upon ourselves, and how our search for intimacy often lands us in unexpected situations and challenging dilemmas.

Four Play takes us some of the way towards this conversation but somehow doesn't have anything fresh to say and doesn't pack sufficient emotional punch to elevate this beyond a dating debrief at brunch.