Barry Dignam | Dream Kitchen / 1999

how to come out without having to say you’re sorry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barry Dignam (screenwriter, based on a play by Kevin McCarthy, and director) Dream Kitchen / 1999 [8 minutes]

 

You might almost say that in relationship to the wonderful 1998 coming films such as Get Real and Edge of Seventeen, Irish director Barry Dignam’s Dream Kitchen is a rather hilarious anti-coming out film. We go back to the days of Arnold Wesker’s kitchen sink dramas in Dignam’s clever screenplay based on a play by Kevin McCarthy.

     The always dreaming Son (Andrew Lovern) of this work, returns home to find his Da (Frank Coughlan) having dived head-first into his car engine, his face almost wiped away by grease and oil. His very much pregnant sister (Sarah Pilkington) rules the living room as she watches telly while digging into a bag of chips. Son’s Ma (Caroline Rothwell) is busy gossiping on the phone, mostly about her seemingly hopeless son.

      But don’t worry, like US actor Jim Parsons of today’s TV sit-coms and films, the nerdy Son is able to fantasize a world that doesn’t and maybe shouldn’t exist, where kitchens are forever modern and spick-and-span clean, his Ma is dressed up drinking a blue cocktail instead of the mix of pure gin and whatever else might have fallen into her glass. Da comes in from his garage work in a clean white uniform, and the daughter, whose soon-to-be baby has seemed to be aborted, brings in her cherry face and blond curls. Speaking a strange Shakespearian-like dialect that Son has heard the night before while watching the Bard on TV. In this new reality, Son finally is able to tell his mother he is gay.

     She’s absolutely delighted with the news, calling in the father to share the good fortune of their son’s life. She’s so excited that she can hardly speak, Da reacting in Shakespearian linguistic drag:

 

Da: Shall I die of old age before I learn what animates you so? Speak swiftly son. Lest you consign your poor father to the grave for curiosity.

Son: Father, I'm gay!

Da: Nay. 'Tis not true. I am not deserving of such good fortune. A son of mine gay?

 

     The sister enters to discover that her parents feel far more blessed about this unheard-of event than any child she might have borne.

     The doorbell rings, and in comes the blessed companion, Andrew, one of the most handsome studs imaginable. Everyone is absolutely bowled over in bliss.

     That is until the kitchen turns once more back into the world of Wesker’s Roots or Chicken Soup with Barley (along with The Kitchen his three most awfully memorable plays).*  Da returns as greasy as he left the car, and Daughter is perhaps even more pregnant. When they ask her what on earth Son is talking about, she describes it as some plays with fairies, obviously Midsummer Night’s Dream which they had watched the night before.

      Even the idea of fairies sets Da off, replying "Bloody perverts!" followed by rants that the program is "rubbish" and "dangerous."

      Just as in the Son’s fantasy, the doorbell rings. And indeed, it is Andrew just as handsome as he was (or nearly so) in Son’s fantasy kitchen romance. Son, already packed, hurriedly rushes to their quite stylish sports car as the two drive off, without obviously even bothering to explain that Son is gay.

 

    Who needs to “come out” to family when you’ve already found your prince charming? In his own way, he does come out only to drive off without any longer needing to say the magic words to his Da, Ma, and sister, the latter of whom looks like she might bear the family twins.

 

*About the time this film was made, I communicated with Arnold Wesker regarding some sort of literary event. I also sent him some of my pseudonymic Kier Peters’ plays, which I’ll grant him credit, he apparently read, writing back something to the effect that “off course, we could never have published work so openly sexual and experimental as yours in England.” I’m sure he had long ago convinced himself of that fact, a self-determined prophecy, which meant his plays were always destined to be murky and dreary sexually repressed dramas. I wonder what he felt about Shelagh Delaney’s wonderful 1958 play A Taste of Honey, which pulled the “Angry Young Men” out of the kitchen and into to the streets—where a young woman conceives a black bastard baby—and back into the kitchen again with a gay man doing the housework and cooking?

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).