Daf James’s three-part drama about a Cardiff club singer and his partner adopting a small boy is bold, loud and often moving, and the adoption process is drawn better than we have seen on television. It also piles on more sorrow than it can carry.
Gabriel (Siôn Daniel Young) sings in sequins at a Cardiff gay club called Neverland. His partner Andy (Fra Fee) does accounts and keeps the house. They want a child, and the first of Daf James’s three episodes, all directed by James Kent, is about what it takes to be allowed one: forms, home visits, and a social worker who needs to know everything Gabriel did before he was sober. Lost Boys and Fairies is a musical about adoption and a drama about addiction and a memory play about a dead mother, sometimes within a single scene. We admired its nerve and we recommend it. We also think it would be a better series with a third less in it.
The adoption material is the best thing here, and the thing we had not seen done properly before. Claire (Sharon D. Clarke) is not an obstacle and not a saint; she is a professional doing a difficult job with a notebook, and Clarke plays her as someone who has heard every version of the story and still listens. The interviews in the couple’s living room are written with real care for how the process works, what it asks of people and why it asks it. When Gabriel has to say out loud what he used to do in club toilets, and Andy has to sit beside him and hear it again, James lets the silence do most of the work. The boy they are matched with, Jake, is seven and watchful, and the scenes of the two men learning to be in a room with him are small, awkward and true.
Then the music starts. Gabriel’s numbers on the Neverland stage are staged as full productions, coloured light and dry ice, and Kent cuts between the stage and the kitchen or the farm so that the song comments on whatever Gabriel cannot say in prose. Peter Gregson’s score underneath is strings, mostly low and slow, and it is at its best when it stays under the dialogue rather than swelling up to meet the stage. Some of the numbers land. Some of them interrupt a scene that was doing fine on its own, and we found ourselves waiting for the lights to come back up so the people could carry on talking.
What got to us most was not on the stage at all. Emrys (William Thomas), Gabriel’s father, is a farmer and a chapelgoer who speaks to his son in Welsh and has never once managed the sentence Gabriel needs from him. Thomas plays him with his hands and his hat and almost no words, and a scene of the two of them in a kitchen, both looking at the table, moved us more than any of the songs because nobody was trying to move us. Young is good throughout, loose and funny in the club and wound tight everywhere else, and he is best opposite Thomas. Fee has the harder job, the steady one, and makes Andy’s patience look like a decision rather than a default.
Around them the cast is strong and underused. Arwel Gruffydd’s Berwyn, the club’s owner and its resident queen Fanny Ample, is the one grown-up in Gabriel’s old life and gets about a scene an episode to prove it. Maria Doyle Kennedy and Elizabeth Berrington are both here, both welcome, and both sent off before we had finished enjoying them. Shaheen Jafargholi’s Celyn, a younger performer at Neverland, is given a thread the series seems to forget.
The problem is accumulation. By the end of the second episode Gabriel has been given addiction, a dead mother, a father who cannot speak, a childhood in chapel, a history in sex clubs and an adoption panel, and the third episode adds a turn we will not describe. Each strand is handled with feeling. Together they leave the series no room to breathe, and the fantasy sequences, which are meant to open things up, more often make a plain scene harder to read. We were moved, and then we were tired, and the tiredness is a flaw in the writing rather than in us.
Against other recent British drama about gay men’s lives it holds up well, and it is braver than most about putting a man’s worst nights on the record and still asking us to hand him a child. At three hours it is not a long commitment. Watch it over two nights rather than one, and keep a tissue and a certain scepticism to hand; you will need the first more than you expect and the second more than the series would like.
