Resolutely American The Little Dog Laughed deftly satirises Hollywood’s eternal hypocrisy about sex, even today, as the play reminds us there are still no openly gay leading men in Tinseltown.
Diane is a top Hollywood agent who wants to make a movie of a hit New York play about male lovers. She wants to help her fast-rising client, the discreetly gay Mitchell, and wants him to star in it. To accomplish her aims, this female Machiavel has to pull off two tricks: coerce the writer into turning his play into a hetero romance; and keep the sexual preferences of her client, who has fallen for a bisexual rent boy, under wraps. How Diane manages to complete her scheme and cash in, while preventing her client coming out, motors the plot.
Carter Beane’s play is both funny and perceptive about Hollywood’s contempt for wordsmiths and their sexual double standards.Mitchell’s argument that in America only “upper middle-class, straight, conservative men” can be what they want is, in the age of Oprah and Obama, open to all sorts of objections.
Rupert Friend as her smitten client, Harry Lloyd as his boyish lover, and Gemma Arterton as the latter’s disposable squeeze all offer good complementary support, and Jamie Lloyd’s production is smooth as butter.
The play may be too showbizzy for some tastes but, behind its Manhattan waspishness, lurks a general truth: while Hollywood may be the global dream-factory, it still lies about its operatives’ sex-lives.
