Denton and Me

The epigraph of E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End is one of the most sympathetic in literature: “Only connect…” Its longing tone has rung across the century since, and echoes loudly in performer and playwright Sam Rowe’s wonderful one-person play, Denton and Me.

Forster’s yearning is given voice in the two strands that Rowe weaves, helix-like, around one other. In 2011 Rowe was a struggling writer in London, working in a gay bar while procrastination and guardedness stunted his creative and personal lives. A family friend gave him the journals of Denton Welch, a writer born nearly a century earlier. The story of Welch’s loneliness and isolation, his ache to have someone to hold, and his falling in love with Eric Oliver struck a chord with Rowe’s own situation.

And so the play flits back and forth between extracts from Welch’s journals and episodes in Rowe’s own life. The parallels are striking. In one fantastic sequence, Rowe enacts a date in an expensive restaurant with a Cypriot investment banker. The dialogue is flirtatious, funny and naturalistic. This is followed by Welch’s account of sitting quietly by a fire with Oliver, knees close, as they dry themselves off after getting caught in the rain. The dialogue is terse. This is a date for a gay man in 1940s rural Kent. Both end on late night buses, capsules of disappointment and crushed hope that remain consistent across the ages.

The surfaces of gay life may have changed, but the depths remain unchanged. Rowe’s script matches the literary detail of Welch’s journals. Lines about “municipal green books” and “bruised plums” sing out like poetry in his commanding performance. Through the haze of melancholia that hangs over both lives on show, something hopeful emerges. With an unspoken nod to Forster, Denton and Me reveals the fundamental necessity of connection: through literature, across centuries, and ultimately, with each other. This is a humane, profound piece of theatre.