There’s a lot to love about Pride at the National Theatre, particularly in its songs and its cast, but its fall at the final hurdle reveals an understanding of queer politics that’s failed to evolve in the last ten years.
It was inevitable that Pride would become a musical. With Matthew Warchus having already successfully straddled the worlds of stage and screen with the Netflix adaptation of the Matilda musical, it’s only natural that he and screenwriter Stephen Beresford return to their 2014 dramatisation of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and adapt it for the stage.
In 1984, Mark Ashton realises that the police have scaled back their harassment of gays and lesbians at that year’s Pride events in London because officers have been deployed across the country to harass the striking miners instead. Realising that these groups share a common enemy in the Thatcher government that’s trying to destroy them, Mark galvanises his fellow gay activists (and one lesbian!) into forming a charitable support group. They reach out to the villages clustered in the coalfields of the Dulais Valley, and it’s from here that an unlikely alliance flourishes between the two communities.
Both Pride the movie and the musical adhere pretty strictly to the “feel-good” formula that’s been a recurring staple in the British film industry, and indeed in musical adaptations of British films, since The Full Monty. Our ragtag bunch of misfits’ response to the harsh world around them is to set themselves an unusual goal, with the odds stacked against them.
However overfamiliar, formulas are all about application, and Pride applies the formula to tell its story in an absorbing manner. Right from the start, we’re swept into the story by Mark’s hunger for change, which keeps the narrative moving forward. Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde provide a bright and sparkly selection of songs, including the showstopping four-on-the-floor pastiche, I Miss Disco. But the standout musical moment is the first-act closer, Bread and Roses. The real-life trade union song makes an emotive appearance in the original film but proves to be even more impactful in a live stage performance.
The cast are uniformly excellent, with Samuel Barnett the standout amongst them. Worlds away from his breakout role on stage and screen as the timid, yearning Posner in The History Boys, he ignites the stage as Jonathan, wilfully defiant in the face of an HIV diagnosis and anyone who suggests that he should be anyone less than his full self.
So, it seems like all the pieces are there. The book even makes a few tweaks that improve upon the original screenplay. The film relied more on Joe, a fictional newcomer taking his first steps away from the world of his parents in humdrum Bromley into the wider gay world, as a receptacle for exposition. With the stage providing a more porous fourth wall, the characters can simply speak directly to the audience as necessary, making Joe more peripheral and leaving space for more interesting characters to breathe. Although the movie certainly doesn’t ignore the AIDS crisis, it’s not a major focus. The musical can convey through song both the scale of the crisis and the depth of the loss suffered by the queer community. However, there is one notable instance where the show ought to have been more ambitious than its source material.
Musicals about political struggle need to end with a call to action. In the first act of Les Misérables, the question “Will you join in our crusade?” is posed to the students at the ABC Cafe, but the show ends by putting that same question to the audience. Even Rent, a musical that’s taken no small amount of heat for an approach to the AIDS crisis that seems almost blithely apolitical in retrospect, ends with an entreaty to live for the moment, however fleeting that moment might be.
However, Pride on stage ends as it does on screen, with a “where-are-they-now” epilogue that fills us in on the later lives of a few key characters. It’s just as it was in 2014, even down to the fact that, after being one of the first people in Britain to be diagnosed with HIV, Jonathan Blake is amazingly still with us at the ripe old age of 77.
A lot has happened since 2014. Ending the story on a commemorative but ultimately celebratory note made sense at a point in time when gay marriage had been legalised in the UK and Obergefell v. Hodges was just about to do the same in the US. But in 2026, the chord that that same note strikes is a bit too pat and a bit too disingenuous.
After the Act, the verbatim musical about Section 28 that ran at the Royal Court last year, naturally covers a lot of the same cultural terrain as Pride. Still, it doesn’t shy away from warning its audience that the history of state-sponsored homophobia it’s just recounted to them is now repeating itself with transphobia. At a time when political bad actors are encouraging cisgender queer people to disavow our trans siblings in search of mainstream respectability, Pride’s narrow focus on a specifically cisgender gay-and-lesbian slice of queer history without so much as an indirect acknowledgement of trans people’s existence feels blinkered and politically misjudged.
It’s a heavy charge to lay against a musical that gets so many things right, but this ending undercuts the message the show is reaching for but doesn’t quite grasp. It begins with a massive chorus number declaring that Pride is a protest movement and not a party. Still, if you refuse to discuss what exactly it is people are supposed to be protesting against, then really you’re just quibbling over vibes instead of standing for anything of any real consequence. The songs extoll the benefits of solidarity, but at no point is there a reminder of who outside the walls of the theatre is most in need of that solidarity right now.
Pride is playing at the National Theatre through to September 12.
Follow Us