The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me Review | Seven Dials Playhouse London

A solo revival of David Drake’s AIDS era monologue returns to London

First performed Off Broadway in 1992, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me quickly became one of the longest running solo plays in New York theatre history. Written and originally performed by Obie Award winner David Drake, the piece emerged at the height of the AIDS crisis and has since become a landmark work of LGBTQ+ theatre.

This new production, presented by Hive North, marks its return for LGBT+ History Month, playing first at Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester before transferring to Seven Dials Playhouse in London. Directed by Offie nominated Adam Zane and performed by Gabriel Clark, it runs for seventy minutes without interval.

Drake’s script unfolds through a series of vivid vignettes rather than a linear narrative. A sixth birthday in 1969 sits beside early awakenings of desire. Musical theatre obsessions blur into nights in New York clubs. The emotional pivot arrives in 1985, when seeing Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart becomes, as the title suggests, a moment of reckoning.

Gabriel Clark carries the entire evening alone. Known to many for playing Ollie Morgan in Channel 4’s Hollyoaks, Clark brings both warmth and control to the stage. There is nowhere to hide in a solo performance of this scale. He moves between ages and emotional states with clarity, never pushing too hard. The hopeful boy who dreams of Broadway still flickers beneath the man shaped by activism and loss.

The structure does not ease the audience gently through time. It jumps. Just as you settle into one rhythm, it shifts. A playful recollection tightens. A moment of flirtation gives way to something heavier. That instability begins to feel intentional. The decades it reflects were marked by urgency and fear. The form mirrors that.

Lighting constantly reshapes the space. At times Clark is isolated in a narrow white spotlight that feels almost interrogative, as if he is answering to his own past. Elsewhere, warmer tones allow moments of intimacy to breathe. During passages reflecting the height of the AIDS epidemic, the light becomes starker, almost clinical. Without any change of set, time and mood shift through light alone.

Sound deepens that atmosphere. Musical cues rooted in the 1980s anchor certain sections without turning them into nostalgia. Club ambience swells and recedes. In several scenes, silence proves more powerful than music. When the sound drops away, you hear Clark’s breathing. The room becomes very aware of itself.

There are passages that could be tighter. Some sections stretch slightly beyond their natural endpoint. Yet the performance itself never drifts. Clark allows humour to land lightly and grief to sit without excess. The emotional shifts feel earned rather than performed.

What lingers is not one speech but the layering of memory. The quiet references to friends who did not survive the decade. The sense of a life assembled in fragments rather than presented as a neat arc.

Directed by Adam Zane, whose long history of work within the LGBTQ+ community informs the production’s tone, this revival resists sentimentality. It does not soften the anger that fuelled its creation in the early 1990s. Watching it now, the urgency does not feel distant.

By the final moments, there is no attempt to summarise. Clark stands there, and the room holds still a second longer than usual before the applause begins.