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"I wanted to write a
working-class gay story
- an antidote to Maurice."
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There are several problems with meeting Jonathan Harvey. The first is that he was up drinking with his mates till three last night; his voice is gravelly, his sentences trail off halfway through, and each time this happens he slides another inch nearer the floor. The second is that he doesn't want me to tell you all the really juicy stuff, like the ex-boyfriend who was ---- for ---- and the fact that he had to quit Kentish Town pronto after ---- waved a ---- at his flatmate because her ---- were too loud. Not every interviewee is as engaging as Jonathan Harvey. Even if he was born in 1968, the ----.
Jonathan Harvey is already well known in theatrical circles as one of Britain's most successful young playwrights, but it's his screen adaptation of his play Beautiful Thing, a stage hit in 1993, that looks like launching the 28-year-old Liverpudlian into the limelight since it screened at Cannes to standing ovations.
Set during a sweltering summer on a sarf London council estate, Beautiful Thing is a teenage love story with a difference: the lovebirds are both 15-year-old boys. Like the play, the film takes place almost entirely on the walkway connecting three adjoining flats. It might sound stagy, but it's as fresh as Harvey's screenplay, a randy feelgood farce that's as close to Minder as it is to Muriel's Wedding.
Harvey was born in Halewood, Liverpool, to a postie-turned-social-worker father and a family-planning nurse mother: sympathy from an early age. A promising stage career was cut short at the age of 13, the day after his first sexual experience, when teenage acne suddenly blossomed and sent Harvey into hiding (in his bedroom), where he started writing instead. As the zits improved, so did the plays.
Beautiful Thing was originally set in Liverpool and called The Venom Stiletto. "I'd never written anything with gay characters before," says Harvey, "but I thought I should be a bit more honest.. I just wrote about all these people, but I didn't really know what was going on." He entered into a playwriting competition "and I got notes back saying, 'This is a pile of crap.'"
He carried on. By this time Harvey had moved to London and was teaching in a school in Thamesmead - the actual estate where Beautiful Thing was filmed. It's also the setting for one of his other comedies, Babies, about a gay teacher. Harvey's early stage success encouraged him to give up teaching and try writing full time. The gamble paid off. "I was surprised it happened so quickly," he says, "and it left me a bit empty, thinking, What do you do when you're 25 and you've got two plays on in the West End? My ambition when I left teaching was to just have a play on in London - now I've had a film done, which was never even an ambition of mine. So it's really where do I go from here?"
Where does he go from here? Hollywood? "No. I went to Los Angeles a couple of years back - they were doing a reading of Babies. They sent me out there to a beautiful hotel and I thought LA was vile - just plastic and… nothing. I didn't stick around to watch the play; I just caught the next plane back."
Joe Esterhas may not be trembling in his boots, but perhaps Jackie Collins and Stephen Sondheim should be. "I'm writing a novel," confesses Harvey, "and I'm writing a strange musical with the Pet Shop Boys. The novel's a pastiche of Jackie Collins, about a London modeling agency called (adopts a Maggie Smith voice) Blushes. Richenda Scott, the owner, gets murdered, and Vida St. Claire, head of Islington CID, is brought in to bring the killer to book… (returning to earth) It's compulsive illiteracy, really.
It sounds worrying like Rupert Everett's deathless meisterwerks. "God no, it's better than that. It'll either be a cult smash hit or a pile of shite, but it'll never be as bad as his stuff. Writing a novel's like having a different persona: when I see 'Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine' I want (breathy whisper) 'Jonathan Harvey writing as Idaho Winchester.' I was reading Jackie Collins on holiday. Me boyfriend took Hollywood Kids and was reading it but tutting all the time. So I read about 20 pages and flung it across the room and said, 'I could do better than that!' So that's what I'm attempting to do."
As for the Pet Shop Boys: "They approached me. They'd seen a few of my plays and said would I be interested in doing a theatre musical. I was a bit cagey about it, because they could have been wankers. But they took me out for lunch and we just immediately clicked."
Harvey retains a strong attachment to Liverpool - he certainly hasn't lost his accent - so it seems odd that none of his plays has been set there. "I've avoided Liverpool, because it's a city I love and it gets a very bad press. At the point where I writing Beautiful Thing, if I'd set it in Liverpool I would have been doing a lot of editing in my head because of the way it might make Liverpudlians look. It angers me when you're watching something set in Liverpool and of course there have to be some kids running away with next door's piano."
If Harvey wanted to avoid stereotyping his home town, he also wanted to avoid stereotyping homosexuality, at least as far as British cinema has usually painted it. "I wanted to write a working-class gay story," Harvey explains, "because I felt in the media, if you're working-class and gay you become a rent boy… Growing up gay you look around for the images - I mean, if I was a heterosexual teenager I'd be able to watch Beverly Hills 90210 and see someone going to the prom with the gorgeous girl. I wanted an element of that in Beautiful Thing, rather than gay images like Another Country and Maurice, which were fine and exciting for me - you know, they were two men together - but it was all posh schools. Beautiful Thing was an antidote to that, really. - Christopher Stocks
Beautiful Thing is released in the UK on June 14.
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