A young man and his gay ghost loiter in the background of Andrew O’Hagan’s poignant novel Be Near Me, which inspired a rush of superlatives when it was published a couple of years ago. Ian McDiarmid’s misguided stage adaptation of the book, though, is greatly diminished by the fact that these crucial figures in the distant past of a middle-aged gay priest have been virtually expunged.

As a result audiences watching John Tiffany’s elegant production, which conveys a strong sense of an economically stricken, sectarian town on the Ayrshire coast, will find it hard — unless they have read the book — to appreciate its searing impression of how bereavement can stunt and later threaten the ruin of one introverted life.

The novel’s key figure, Father David Anderton, a middle-aged priest whose passions are limited to classical music, wine-tasting and literature, is finely played by McDiarmid, all effervescent camp in private and shuttered inscrutability in public. Despatched from Lancashire to a Scottish backwater, where drugs and drinking are favourite pleasures, Anderton reveals himself as a man whose late Sixties, political idealism has faded. Tiffany’s actors usefully intersperse the action with songs, hymns and ballads that characterise the conflicted society in which Anderton unhappily finds himself.

Peter McKintosh’s aluminium back-drop suggests a world of closed down businesses behind it. In this environment the aesthetic Anderton feels himself unwelcome, save for Blythe Duff as his culture-hungry, mortally sick housekeeper. “I’ve never been sure I belong anywhere in the world,” Anderton exclaims in one of those self-
revealing moments that McDiarmid clears of distracting sentimentality.

Danger threatens when the priest strikes up an odd friendship with two rather delinquent teenagers — Helen Mallon’s tough Lisa and her boyfriend, Richard Madden’s handsome but too mature-looking Mark, who likes to imagine himself a hip-hop Jamaican gangster. The scene in which the priest and Mark share ecstasy and alcohol, a combination goading the priest to plant a kiss upon the face of the unappreciative boy, though to go no further than hand-holding, lacks authenticity’s ring.

The production would have carried more psychological conviction if McDiarmid had incorporated the novel’s powerful Oxford chapter, in which we discover that the spectre in David’s life is an undergraduate, Liverpudlian Conor, whom he loved and then lost to a car accident.

The notion that David is attempting to recover his lost youth by pursuing Mark strikes contrived, clichéd notes. It would have been more persuasively rendered if Conor had appeared as a ghostly presence, a haunting figure from the priest’s imagination before and after he faced a vengeful mob and a trial for sexual indecency. Still, McDiarmid’s Peter Pan-like priest, beset by loss of hope and love, shimmers with vulnerability and sadness.