I seem to have got away with it,” Jonathan Harvey ventures, of the public response to his first play in nearly a decade.

As the writer of gay love story Beautiful Thing, uber-camp BBC sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme and, latterly, some of Coronation Street’s most interesting storylines, he was dubious about unveiling an unapologetically angry look at nearly 50 years of triumph and struggle in the gay community.

“I did think they [the critics] might say, ‘Who does he think he is, trying to be all serious!’ I think it’s very easy to dismiss me as a purveyor of light, camp froth, so this was always going to be an adventure.” Commissioned by English Touring Theatre and the Liverpool Playhouse, where Harvey’s earliest works were performed, the play was something he had been “burning to write” for some time, after being struck by a conversation with a radio DJ.

“I did an interview in 1995 and afterwards the DJ told me a story about how he’d had aversion therapy in the 1960s to ‘cure’ him of his gayness. Years later, he went to a gay club and bumped into the bloke who’d administered the therapy. He had to be held back from attacking him. There was something about the story that stuck with me – the irony of the characters involved and the length of time between the two incidents.”

Canary opens with a senior police officer trapped in his home by the media camped out on his doorstep, about to reveal his ongoing love affair with a man.

Their relationship is related through a series of flashbacks as the character decides whether to admit all to his family. Intertwined with this is the story of a couple of best friends who run away to London in the 1980s.

It’s been dubbed “Our Gay Friends In The North” in reference to the BBC’s acclaimed early-1990s TV drama that followed the fortunes of four friends in Newcastle over several decades.

“It’s a good analogy,” Harvey says. “The play dips backwards and forwards in time and it’s only as it goes on you start to understand how the characters are linked.”

Taking in the Gay Liberation Front to Thatcherism, the miners’ strike and the arrival of Aids, everything in this ambitious play is based on true events. Harvey spent a lot of time researching at the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive and Oral History Collection, much of which was compiled in the 1980s when people dying of Aids rushed to mark their lives.

Harvey has described Canary as a cautionary tale and a reminder. It takes its title from campaigner Peter Tatchell’s assertion that “women and gay people are the litmus test of whether a society is democratic and respecting human rights. We are the canaries in the mine”.

“It’s certainly a 42-year-old’s play,” he reflects. “I needed the benefit of hindsight and a bit of history of my own in order to look back in anger. Lots of younger gay people coming to see the play have no idea these things went on.”

Harvey is reunited with Hettie Macdonald, the BAFTA-winning director who worked with him on the original stage and film versions of the critically-acclaimed Beautiful Thing. “I’ve always wanted to work with her again but she’s never been available,” he says. “She really pushes me to work hard and keep chipping away until the play’s as good as it can be. She asks the right questions to make it better and more fluid.”

After nine years concentrating primarily on his TV work, Harvey’s thrilled to be back in theatre.

“It was an oversight on my part that I didn’t have a play on in all this time. From a writer’s point of view, telly is really well paid and it’s nice not having to leave the house when you’re working on something, but you don’t gauge the way an audience is responding to your work in the way you do with theatre.

I’d missed that.”

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