Review: DANIEL'S HUSBAND, Marylebone Theatre

We’re in a room straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest, two couples lounging on mid-century chaise longues while sipping Scotch. Like most plays set entirely in someone’s living room, though, fault lines amidst the middle-class domestic bliss soon emerge.

Contrary to the title of Michael McKeever’s play, which premiered off-Broadway in 2017, New York architect Daniel (Joel Harper-Jackson) and his long-term partner Mitchell (Luke Fetherston) are not married, and it’s an ongoing point of contention in their relationship.

Mitchell rails against the pressure to conform to heteronormative, patriarchal and capitalist ideas of what a relationship between "typical Americans" should look like, while Daniel desires formal commitment, in part due to a heightened sense of his own father’s failures as a husband. Both these perspectives are valid, and the production allows both of them to emerge naturally over dinner party conversation, without feeling preachy in either direction.

There are two main witnesses to this dilemma, Mitchell’s peacemaking literary agent Barry (David Bedella), and his much younger boyfriend Trip (a sardonic Raiko Gohara). The latter never gets much characterisation beyond lazy Gen Z stereotyping (not knowing how to operate a record player, for instance), but he's necessary as a lens unto a generation of queer people who have never known an adult life without equal marriage.

Where Daniel’s Husband, thus far a gently paced vignette from the lives of affluent modern gay men, takes a turn is when Daniel experiences a stroke and becomes quadriplegic. Since Daniel and Mitchell aren’t married, Daniel’s mother Lydia (Liza Sadovy) is able to obtain power of attorney over her son and move him, against Mitchell’s will, into her home.

Lydia has been previously introduced as a mostly comic character, a well-intentioned yet overbearing divorcee who says things like “gay sons are the best”, so the plot now requires her to have undergone a personality transplant. Sadovy does her best to make the character feel consistent, but the sharp about-face from charming neediness to vicious courtroom homophobia is difficult to stomach.

It’s unfortunate that Daniel’s stroke feels so jarring as a plot point, because McKeever is tender in his approach to writing about disability. Director Alan Souza breaks with his previously fluid, barely-there approach to give the newly disabled Daniel a moment in the harsh glare of the spotlight, highlighting the tension between his fully realised thoughts and his new, total inability to express them.

Ultimately, though, this reads like a cautionary tale proving Daniel right and Mitchell wrong. Gone is the nuance underlying the earlier conversations about gay marriage in the US a decade on; in its place is a simplistic morality fable that seems to put the onus on Mitchell for having (highly justified, some might say) reservations about the institution of marriage. There doesn’t seem to be much room for critique of the wider societal homophobia that might lead the court to be unsympathetic towards his case.

Beneath the veneer of this stylish production is the thoughtfulness and subtlety that the ongoing debate about the place of marriage in the LGBTQ+ community deserves. However, in its attempts to make not wanting to get married into a kind of tragic flaw, Daniel’s Husband has wound up contradicting and simplifying its own messages.

Read our interview with director Alan Souza and writer Michael McKeever here.

Daniel's Husband plays at Marylebone Theatre until 10 January 2026