Man in an Orange Shirt is a heart-rending account of gay life in Forties Britain - review
Novelist Patrick Gale drew a key scene in Man in an Orange Shirt (BBC Two) from family history: how his mother found a stash of passionate love letters in his father’s desk and was horrified to see they had been written not by a former girlfriend, but by the best man at his wedding.
Just such a discovery proved pivotal in the opening part of this fine TV drama, which explored the corrosive impact of being unable to pursue love truly and to the full. Up to that point, the story had been a familiar, if exquisitely wrought, tale of repression; of how two Army officers, Michael (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Thomas (James McArdle), met during the Second World War and fell in love.
Demobbed and out of uniform – in both senses – they spent a happy, sexually fulfilled sojourn in a secluded cottage. But, predictably, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal, they ended up in love yet living apart when Michael chose to marry his fiancée Flora (Joanna Vanderham).
What lifted Gale’s drama out of the ordinary was its acknowledgement that this was also Flora’s tragedy. Until she discovered the truth, the pain had been Michael and Thomas’s alone – bowler-hatted banker Michael’s for being too hidebound to be true to his sexuality; artist Thomas’s for falling in love with a man who could never be his. But Flora, too, was condemned to spend a lifetime resenting being duped into a sham marriage. Her shame over what society deemed to be her husband’s “criminal” leanings meant she, too, calcified emotionally, all hope of happiness cut adrift.
Even that was not the end of it. The hurt looked set to ripple down generations as, 60 years on, it overshadowed the widowed Flora’s (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) relationship with her grandson Adam (Julian Morris) in scenes that briefly bookended this opening chapter.
Performance-wise, Frances de la Tour brought enormous sympathy to the role of Thomas’s mother Mrs March, while Jackson-Cohen and McArdle personified brilliantly the two poles of the dilemma gay men faced: to bow to social convention and die inwardly or live a true life and be pilloried for it. All of this made for a thoroughly engaging drama that did a terrific job of reminding us how damaging and repellent attitudes to homosexuality were in the not-so-distant past.
