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With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
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I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
Fiona Mountford's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Guy Hargreaves.
Cast: National Youth Theatre
Description: A political comedy written by James Graham about the young people within the new Conservative party.
Trains: Tube: Tottenham Court Road 
, Tube / Bus: 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 25, 38, 55, 73, 98, 176 
Phone: 0207478 0100
Website: www.sohotheatre.com
Extra info: Food, Pub
Out of the blue: Sam Marks as James and Shaun Rivers as Sam in James Graham's Tory Boy
Twenty-six-year-old playwright James Graham has been worrying variously, and productively, at the Conservative Party for a fair while. He’s tackled Anthony Eden (Eden’s Empire) and Maggie Thatcher (Little Madam) and now, for the National Youth Theatre, he examines simultaneously the Cameron-era Nu-Con and the sexual ambiguity that clouded the career of Edward Heath.
The subject of young gay Tories working in Westminster isn’t new — it was a plot strand in last year’s puzzlingly undervalued BBC2 series Party Animals — but Graham goes at it with fizz, flair and no small degree of humour.
Sam, who is northern, gay and still awkward about his sexual orientation, works for the shadow education minister alongside braying former public schoolboy Nicholas, whose attitudes appear ever less reconstructed as the action progresses. Are the Tories still, as Nicholas posits, lagging behind in their thinking about what constitutes an acceptable relationship?
A top-notch young cast tear into this at full pelt, in a precision-drilled production from Guy Hargreaves. We’ll certainly be hearing more from Shaun Rivers, who nicely captures the divide between Sam’s political astuteness and personal gaucheness and Dan Ings, who gives the impression that he could still be firing off Nicholas’s punchy one-liners tomorrow morning with no discernible loss of energy. Interwoven with this is a whistle-stop tour through the emotionally constipated life of Heath, who fails repeatedly as the years pass to respond to the subtle advances of his childhood friend Kay. We wind up with Heath as a junior whip, engulfed by rumour about his private life. Graham’s thesis is clear — we have actually already had our first gay Prime Minister — even if he doesn’t ultimately convince us that we need to spend quite so long away from Sam and Nicholas watching young Ted learn the piano.
If such accomplishment has whetted appetites for more from the NYT, there’s good news. Tory Boyz plays in repertoire alongside three further offerings from the company, Eating Ice Cream on Gaza Beach by Shelley Silas, Jane Bodie’s Out of Me and Sick Room, an evening of sketches about the NHS.
In rep until 13 September (020 7478 0100; www.sohotheatre.com).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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