Harvey's Mountain pays off

Six years after Jonathan Harvey first seduced theatre-goers with the rosy optimism of his teenage coming-out tale, Beautiful Thing, he is facing up to the more adult business of death, guilt and survival in his latest drama. Although Hushabye Mountain is his 12th play (and another comedy), it is the first time he has tackled the HIV issue head-on.

It was not, he says, a question of avoiding the subject, an all too obvious one for a gay playwright. The Donmar Warehouse in fact commissioned the piece three years ago, then decided the now infamous "theatrical Viagra" of Nicole Kidman in the The Blue Room would be more of a turn-on at the box-office than Harvey talking about protease inhibitors.

The wait has paid off because medicine now offers a more poignant heart to Harvey's drama than he could have imagined earlier in the decade. His plot centres on a man simultaneously grieving for one boyfriend who has died of Aids and embarking on a fresh relation-ship with a man whose prospects are far brighter thanks to new anti-viral drugs.

"When I wrote Beautiful Thing I did not know anyone who was HIV-positive," says Harvey. "I would not say my life is full of positive people, but I do know more people who are affected by it now. I was suddenly aware of people I knew a few years ago who died, and people who are doing OK now, and I was aware of my own feelings about that.

"People ask if I worry the play is going to be out of date in a few years or months. I don't, because it's a snapshot of life at the moment for people living with HIV and Aids. These treatments might not carry on being successful."

Positive in tone, the play uses his familiar mix of humour, kitsch and fantasy: Danny, played by Andrew Lincoln (Egg in This Life), is visited at the pearly gates by his mum (in a boat) in the guise of Judy Garland. Director Paul Miller describes it as "like an episode of Friends except with gay characters and lots of drug-taking".

The title - taken from the lullaby Dick Van Dyke sings in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - suggests fairy-tale whimsy, but Harvey means it to be ironic. "What the characters in the play realise is that when the going gets tough, Mary Poppins does not come in singing Feed the Birds," he says. "Life is shit and you just have to get on with it."

Quite the opposite seems true for Harvey since winning the Evening Standard's Most Promising Playwright award in 1994. Although reviews for his prolific output have been uneven, he claims the tag has never been a pressure. "It's fabulous!" he splutters, banging down his Diet Coke. "Better than being called a big c**t, isn't it? Theatrical voice of my generation I am, love! Got it on my wall. Delightful - and it pisses other writers off."

Growing up in Liverpool, Harvey wanted to act but hormones inter-fered. "I got really bad acne and didn't want anyone to look at me, so I stopped," he says. It sounds like a narrow escape. "I did the Wizard Of Oz and was the only munchkin to be congratulated for using an American accent in the dress rehearsal," he says. "Unfor-tunately, I had to wear satin breeches, which I ripped and then had to sit in. It scarred me for life." At 18, he was named Liverpool Playhouse Young Writer of the Year - the same year he came out. His parents, a nurse and a postman-turned-social worker, did not react well at first. "Until I was about 24 or 25, it wasn't brilliant," he says. "I wasn't in a relationship, so I found that difficult. I would see my brother and his wife home for Christmas and I would get all upset thinking if I had a fella would they let me bring him back? When I had to go back for the first time with my new boyfriend, I thought I wouldn't make an issue about him sleeping in my room because it's two single beds and it's only a two-bedroom house, but they had pushed the beds together for us. It was very sweet, but that would not have happened eight years ago."

Now 30, he draws on his working-class background, and brief career as a teacher, for material. There is a lot of him in the Andrew Lincoln character Danny, whom he describes as "a survivor who's been toughened up." Although he claims not to get upset over reviews, he was clearly riled by the bad reaction to his BBC sitcom, Gimme Gimme Gimme.

"The gay press were quite rude about it. It f***ed me off, them saying I had let the side down, because I have spent my whole career trying to change the way gay people are perceived. It's enough to make you homophobic. I never wrote Gimme Gimme Gimme to change anybody's life; I did it to make them laugh."

HIS style is certainly gentler than the tabloid-teasing of Queer As Folk or the hard-core shocks of Mark Ravenhill. "I find it a bit embarrassing to be too rude," he laughs. "I can be the filthiest sod on earth, but to get up and be vocal about it... I think there are better ways to entertain people. When you watch Mark Ravenhill's stuff, it does make you feel really boring in your writing, but it doesn't make me want to do stuff like people getting raped up the bum with a knife." Instead, he is working on a musical with the Pet Shop Boys, which they want Gemma