   THEATRE / Kissing in the back row: Paul Taylor on Stupid
Cupid, Phil Wilmott's foray into Hollywood 'romance', at the
Battersea Arts Centre  The road back to the 1950s seems to be
congested with gay theatre practitioners just at present. First
there was Night After Night, Neil Bartlett's thought-provoking
look at the gay subtext of 1950s musical theatre and at the
ambiguous position of the homosexual chorus boy.  Now, hot on
the heels of that piece, comes Gay Sweatshop's Stupid Cupid, a
musical by Phil Wilmott, which - archly advertising itself as 'a
sin- steeped story of yesterday's bent generation' - looks at
homosexual history from the perspective of 1950s cinema.
Interspersed with tongue-in- cheek pastiche period numbers, the
show leaps back and forth between the world of the Peckham
Picture Palace and the studios of Tinsel Town, contrasting the
Technicolour Hollywood promise of freedom, glamour and
heterosexual romance with both the grey and constrained milieu
of gay English cinema-goers and the some