The 29th April, a month after the UK's first homosexual marriages, is a particularly apt date for Tory Boyz, directed by Bea Svistunenko, to open. Using the dual settings of the modern Tory party under the coalition and its earlier incarnation at the time of Ted Heath, the play charts the struggles of Sam (Andrew Room), a young gay researcher in the Tory party who has enormous difficulty reconciling his private life and public persona.

Despite its political setting, however, Svistunenko is adamant that it is not a play trying to make any party political point: “It is a political play and you can’t avoid that. But it’s nuanced and doesn’t settle for demeaning stereotypes. I don’t want to portray it as ‘all Conservatives are terrible’  or the other way round because that’s not what it’s about. Politics sets the scene in the background, but it’s really about Sam’s individual struggle to reconcile his sexuality with his public political life - to get over his fear, maybe. He’s very apprehensive about showing anything.”

There is, however, something about the Tory party in particular that makes this more of a challenge, thinks Svistunenko. “Sam feels that it’s easier for James, his potential love interest in the Labour party, to be open about these things because Labour is generally accepted as the more liberal and open-minded. But in the Tory party he needs to suppress his feelings.”

“There’s this bit in the play where Nicholas, his boss, says that in the ‘real world’ you have to separate that from your political personality - you can’t ‘flaunt’ it. It’s a horrible way of putting it, but it’s the way lots of people in the party still feel,” she continues. “Nicholas is a realist: he points out that the new intake - the researchers and the new front bench - are different, but the back benchers are rooted in the past. Daily Mail readers and the voters are stuck in that past too, and even if people within the Tory party want to move it forwards, there will be voters who disagree.”

Is the play slighting missing its intended polemic audience in Cambridge then? Is it just preaching change to the converted, offering a pat on the back to the liberal elite and saying ‘well done us, we are above the backward masses’? “No,” says Svistunenko, “I don’t feel that is what the play says. I think that it just highlights that change is slow. You might not feel like change is happening - people like Sam get frustrated, look at the past and people like Ted Heath, and feel like nothing has changed - but in reality we are making progress. It’s just slow. The differences are so subtle. We have come a long way. Look at gay marriage. We have come forwards, and things are getting better in this country at least. It’s just taking the time to look at the past, look at ourselves now, and look at it all in perspective, so we can look at how far we’ve come. But also of course there is room for improvement; there are still so many bigoted people like Nicholas.”

“It’s true that people in Cambridge are very open-minded,” she acknowledges, “But, however accepting the audience is, I still think some of them will be surprised. Often people think of Conservatives as being very drawn to the past. In that sense it challenges people’s preconceptions, and Sam’s northern as well. A lot of people associate that with ‘Oh the North. Maggie Thatcher destroyed the coal mines and ruined life in the North, therefore everybody must be Labour’. I want to make people aware of assumptions they have made, and make them realise we can’t keep on making these generalisations; politics and people’s views are changing. We’re becoming more tolerant and more liberal by the day.”

She also thinks that the play could be helpful to people in Cambridge uncertain about their sexuality, though “people in Cambridge are usually very open about their sexuality. Everyone’s a dabbler!” She pauses for a brief moment, slightly shocked at her own phrase. “Urgh, word vomit... I’m so sorry. I still stand by that, it just came out in a strange way. University is the place to explore it and experiment with your political leanings, and of course sexual ones.”

There has also been experimentation and exploration in the rehearsal room (no, not in that way). Svistunenko has made use of workshops and even turned the actual first meeting of actors Andy Room (Sam) and Jake Spence (James) into a dramatic exercise to imitate the manner in which their characters might have met. The cast enthusiastically tell me how much fun they have had rehearsing, something confirmed by the hullabaloo audible in the background of my interview recordings.

The Ted Heath subplot has been particularly interesting to explore. Though nothing has ever been proved, Heath’s sexuality has been the cause of much speculation. Svistunenko describes how the cast watched a BBC documentary to get a glimpse of this elusive character. Though it was assumed early on that he would marry childhood friend, Kay Raven, Heath never married and Svistunenko sees his life as “very similar to Sam in terms of isolation. The main difference is that Sam at least gets the chance to talk about it; in Ted Heath’s time it wasn’t even mentioned.” Perhaps, however, the parallels are clearer than the differences: “Part of the tragedy is that we haven’t changed that much.”

But the play definitely remains hopeful: “Politicians don’t want to make things worse. They all want to make things better, they just disagree on how. Some are obnoxious like Nicholas, it’s true. But Sam is an idealist; not all politicians are dickheads.”

“Overall,” concludes Svistunenko, “The play says that what really matters is what you do, not who you are, where you’re from, what your sexuality is... You can lean to the left, you can lean to the right, but at the end of the day, if you do good things it will pay off.”

We end with one final musing: “My head keeps taking me back to that idiotic phrase - everyone’s a dabbler.”