That time when Mark Gatiss broke my heart.

This is probably going to be the worst review in the history of reviews, if not the very proof that I’m never going to be a good journalist. Why not? Because I always let emotions take over, I get attached to people, stories and characters. I just can’t help it.

I love to be overwhelmed by feelings, good ones and bad ones. It is part of this kind of condition I have, I guess.

Anyway, last October all I was feeling was sadness. It was eating me alive, and I could see no way out. There was just darkness and I was just wandering in it.

Then my best friend, one night, invited me to see a play. To convince me to give it a try she told me it had Mark Gatiss and a half-naked cowboy in it. It sounded quite interesting. So I carried myself to the Park Theatre with all my dark clouds, my foggy mind and my very heavy heart to see The Boys in The Band.

“Let’s hope that cowboy is fit,” I thought as I took my seat. Then something strange happened. The magic of theatre, I guess. The power of a story who has no fear to be real.

The plot is quite simple: Michael (Ian Hallard) organises a party for Harold’s (Mark Gatiss) birthday, inviting all his friends to his apartment in New York. Suddenly, Michael’s college friend, Alan, (John Hopkins) shows up and everything goes wrong. Why? Because Michael, Harold and his friends are gay and Alan is not a fan. Alan’s repulsion makes Michael feel very uncomfortable in his own house (and in his own skin, his own life, among his own friends), and when Michael feels uncomfortable he can be quite a cunt.

Ian Hallard’s performance is astonishing. Not because he’s a cunt, obviously. It is the extraordinary way he wears Michael's soul and invites the whole audience to celebrate his friend’s birthday. I never felt like I was just seeing something performed on stage, I felt like I was living it.

And I had fun. Because it is impossible to resist to the play’s Oscar-Wilde-style-wittiness, to the beautiful sparkle of Emory (played by a superb James Holmes) and to Harold’s aka Gatiss’s two-minutes-long laugh at the end of Act 1.

The Boys in the Band conquered my heart… and then it slapped me in the face. Violently and with no apologies.

In the closing scene, Harold ripped my heart out of my chest and threw it to the floor. I’m sure Michael knows the feeling.

I felt like standing in front of a mirror, naked with all my failures, all my secrets, all my denials laughing at me. The mirror reflected everything I am and I can’t accept to be because it is not “cool”, “popular” or “normal”, and it is rather “weird”, “unusual” and uncommon.

And that’s exactly why The Boys in the Band is the best production I have ever seen. Because it put me right in front of myself.

I understood the journey to self-acceptance is a tough one. No matter who you are. It is something that is often taken for granted but it is not. Not at all. It is a treasure that needs to be earned.

And I am the only person who can gain it for myself.

P.S. The cowboy was fit as hell.

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