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Theatre Review: Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens at the Shaw Theatre

Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens
by Bill Russell and Janet Hood

Shaw Theatre, London, 10-28 August 2010
directed by John-Jackson Almond
musical director Michael Roulston

Reviewed by Richard Canning


This revival of the song cycle by Bill Russell and Janet Hood (which first ran at the Kings Head Theatre, Islington in 1992, but received its world premiere in 1989) must come as a surprising choice – if only because nowadays we know all too well that trying to promote any work of art concerned with the AIDS epidemic is beyond a Sisyphean adventure. The Shaw Theatre is to be applauded, then, for having the conviction to go ahead, setting aside commercial considerations and tackling what is very much a less-heard and seen subject today.

One of the four original singers reprises her role: Miquel Brown – mother of Sinitta, but also fondly remembered by gay men for 1980s Hi-Energy classics such as So Many Men, So Little Time - once again sings as Angela. She is joined by Jonathan Hellyer (playing Brian), a.k.a. the Dame Edna Experience, making his London theatre debut, Leon Lopez (as Doug), and Anna Mateo (as Judith). Hellyer does a great job of his “own” chief song, And the Rain Keeps Falling Down, but is a more subdued stage presence than anyone who has seen him doing cabaret at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern would suspect. Lopez and Mateo in particular are very strong vocally, as well as demonstrating a stage presence which, inevitably, not all of the thirty cast members playing the smaller roles can match (though Titti La Camp as a drag queen is a definite exception).

The aim of the piece – a combination of songs and monologues - is to pay tribute to all those lost to the AIDS epidemic, by virtue of retelling the life stories (and, inevitably, in part, death stories) of thirty people who succumb to it. Each participant is thus given a few minutes on stage to tell it from his or her point of view. The actors then remain on stage, witnessing the other contributions and continuing to inhabit their roles.

The first thing to concede is that the cumulative effect of hearing so many diverse tales of loss, prejudice, deceit and ill fortune is as moving now as it was 17 years ago. That does not prevent me from feeling, however, that the status and purpose of the piece today is not fully clear. Russell has written new monologues for this revival, a good number of which take us, logically enough, to the non-Western terrains with which we now associate the most devastating human experiences of the syndrome. Some are very effective, even taking advantage of moments of winning humour – as when a South African woman begins her monologue with the words: ‘The only thing worse than a man is a politician.’ The conceptual difficulty, however, is, of course, that the original production of Elegies was conceived at a time when the lack of effective treatments for HIV/AIDS had left those turning HIV-positive with few expectations other than their short- or medium-term demise. The drug treatments which would act therapeutically to minimize HIV’s destructive effect upon immune systems rolled out unevenly, but from the USA in 1996, and across Europe in the following years.

The new monologues in Elegies articulated on stage successfully move on the production’s accommodation of the epidemiological reality today, but by introducing the subject of drug treatments, and their uneven presence in different global contexts, it makes the “unadjusted” tales here – those penned in 1993, which inevitably make no reference to drug treatments - feel historical. Thus, the thirty characters listen to, and respond to, a huge variety of reminiscences, but the audience becomes aware that these couldn’t, or didn’t, inhabit the same chronological context.

It’s a small quibble, certainly, since theatre can, and should, be able to remake the world, showing it to us anew. Still, it made me aware of another reservation I felt: that the integrity of each story, with one following the other, interrupted after each block of four or five by the next song, did not help make the evening feel fundamentally dramatic. Conflict and argument have, naturally, played a central role in many or most AIDS dramas, from early candidates such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffmann’s As Is (both 1985), through to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992) and British dramatist Jonathan Harvey’s two epidemic-related works, Hushabye Mountain (1999) and the recent Canary (almost a pastiche of Kushner). In the case of Elegies, however, the evening’s raisons d’etre – to celebrate the diversity of lives lost; to counteract shame, prejudice and secrecy; to offer the broadest range of perspectives on the syndrome – are all worthwhile.

But there is an inevitable simplicity of message, in consequence. It might be summed up as “positivity.” Certainly it is threatened, just for one moment, by the case of the muscle-boy addicted to Crystal Meth, who admits to knowingly exposing numerous online partners to HIV. (A very topical moment, this, given the ongoing trial in Germany of a pop singer with AIDS who is alleged to have failed to communicate her HIV-status to sexual partners). But before and after him, the subtext of the evening seems to involve undifferentiated celebration – as in one of the song titles, Heroes all Around. There’s nothing implicitly wrong with this. It’s just that it can feel like the audience is witnessing a self-help group, rather than being inducted into the uncertainties and complexities which theatrical narrative can offer.

The monologues themselves – rendered in verse - are somewhat uneven, though the best have the same lyrical directness and honesty as the dramatic poems in Thom Gunn’s extraordinary collection, The Man with Night Sweats. A shopaholic girl was especially winning, summarizing her post-diagnosis take on life thus: ‘If spending makes you feel alive, die before the bills arrive!’ The songs, meanwhile, are delivered with enthusiasm and accomplishment. The best can certainly hold a candle to those found in West End musicals embracing much more conservative storylines. The only really wrong note is struck by the unaccountable decision to have the production wrap up with a few lines (only) of Miquel Brown singing the disco anthem So Many Men, So Little Time as the entire cast leaves the stage. Certainly, it’s a vintage tune, invoking a particular time period and gay subculture very strongly. But its lyric – written with explicit appeal for sexually busy gay men in the early 1980s – threatens to complicate, even overshadow the clear steer towards plurality and diversity in the preceding two hours, as well as, rather bafflingly, to take the audience back to a specific and historical moment at the show’s close; a time, perhaps, before which any of these losses would have taken place.

Still, this is a committed (and huge!) cast, performing for free, and The Terrence Higgins Trust is benefitting from every ticket sale. There’s plenty to think about here, and many moments to savour.

Richard Canning. Canning’s edition of AIDS fiction, Vital Signs (2008), is available from Da Capo Press.

Labels: Shaw Theatre, Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 6:54 AM 0 comments

Theatre Review: Desire - the new gay musical

Desire: the new gay musical

Homo Promos Theatre Co.
Music by Peter Murphy
Book and lyrics by Peter Scott-Presland
Based on “States of Desire” by Edmund White

The Albany, Deptford, June 30-July 2

Review by Richard Canning


All credit to Homo Promos, a gay theatre company of 22 years standing, for not taking the easy route. Desire, composed by Peter Murphy, with libretto by Peter Scott-Presland, who also directed, has been ten years in the writing, and features a company of ten singers, four dancers plus full band. Together, those involved in staging this new musical version of American author Edmund White’s pioneering 1980 book States of Desire: travels in gay America all but outnumbered its enthusiastic audience, at one of just three stagings in a very ungay redoubt of South London, on the eve of London Gay Pride.

Scott-Presland had written to White, asking for permission to turn his journalism into a song cycle as early as 1985. He then slowly travelled around the country whose gay subculture White had studied a decade or so earlier – the difference, of course, being the onset of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS – first reported in 1981 - could not even have constituted a footnote in White’s account, though in a 1986 reprint, White added an extensive ‘Afterword’ which reflects on the early, darkest years of ‘plague’ thinking and suffering. Desire draws on this in its final minutes, thus offering a signpost towards the present day; White’s characters inevitably display seventies values, fashions and political positions. This also, rather emphatically casts the hopes, fears, aspirations and plans of its many protagonists into shade. You wonder, and are indeed encouraged to wonder, which, if any, will survive.

Murphy and Scott-Presland have structured their musical largely according to White’s book, which is essentially a collection of unlinked pieces of travel journalism, ordered geographically from West to East. Thus Desire opens on Los Angeles, perhaps a less obvious introduction to the American gay dream than the second city it, and White, tackled: San Francisco. (One curiosity, incidentally, about the recording history of the Village People, was that they racked up songs with pretty much every American city or town of gay repute in the title… It must have been hard, here, to resist the urge to do something with the People, I thought … though, curiously, many of the cast of Desire had VP-style names; there was even a Randy).

The numbers are delivered with assurance and brio throughout. Personally, I enjoyed the comical ones more than the moments of Les Miserables-style earnestness; I’d take ‘Let’s Play Cop’ or ‘Why Can’t I Get Laid?’ (brilliantly delivered by Joe Shefer) over ‘We Can Change Our Lives’ any day. But then I’m a homosexual without the ‘musicals’ gene. Sometimes, too, the ambitious attempt to distill White’s accounts of rather nuanced political questions is not fully realized. A song about the Seattle community’s fights against ‘Initiative 13’, for instance, ended up simply proving confusing – chiefly since police officers were shown wearing gay leather caps.

The middle sections of States of Desire generated the second part of Desire’s first act, and a succession of less likely gay homes is introduced: Kansas, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Houston. This is where the sophistication of White’s approach strikes home. Decades ahead of others, he sought to transcend the clichéd-but-true abbreviations and shorthand of early gay subculture (the ways in which – still today – we can often feel that the bar we are in might be anywhere on the planet) by insisting on gay men’s individuality, singularity and (dare we admit it?) even maturity. In striking respects, contemporary gay culture often felt shallower and lesser than what was being represented on stage, for all the political, social and legal liberalization of the intervening decades (though this is very much an uneven picture in the States, today. Having given birth to gay liberation, America now finds itself trumped by European countries’ legislatures, and those of many other nations too). Of course, you can argue that this largely involved replacing one set of stereotypes with a few more, but, when the cast sweetly partner and sing ‘The Cowboys are Waltzing in Houston Tonight’, who is complaining?

Act Two moves through the South – New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale, Memphis. One of the best vignettes in White’s book relates to a Tennessee-born and –bound couple, Carter and A.J. The best of the night’s songs is generated by their bickering and self-imposed misery in refusing to agree where to move to, though both concede that anywhere would be more rewarding than redneck Memphis: hence, ‘Lord, will we ever get out of here?’

When we hit the East Coast, Desire bucks White’s book’s organisation, starting with the city he closes on, Washington D.C. The tune is decent – ‘Senator, a Word in your Ear’ – but I felt the reorganization a pity. By closing on the seat of government, White was predicting, quite correctly, that the decades to come would find American government perpetually preoccupied, for good and bad, by the question of gay rights, in a way that had never been witnessed or foreseen.
Murphy and Scott-Presland instead progress by way of Boston to Fire Island (which features an accomplished number about a gay houseboy, ‘The Best Job in the World’) and New York City. White’s own love of Manhattan was, perhaps, so acute that he deliberately buried the very long chapter on it before tackling Boston or Washington, to avoid accusations of Big Apple-centrism. However, Desire’s reordering means that New York City – in truth, for the past century, the cradle of American gay dreams, cultures, lifestyles, books, plays, fashions and lives – is musically represented only by Desire’s reflection on the onset of AIDS, ‘Erase the Tapes.’ There’s nothing wrong or inaccurate here. It’s just a pity that the metropolis to which huge numbers of provincial American gay men have moved since time immemorial becomes identified only with the panic, misery, fear and loss of the early 1980s.

Still, ‘Erase the Tapes’ – sung by all the cast – was a moving and bold closing song, very much the equal of material in the small number of AIDS musicals generated to date (William Finn’s March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland; Bill Russell’s Elegies for Angels, Punks, and Raging Queens - soon itself to be revived at London’s Shaw Theatre) – poignant and welcomingly unforced.

The staging of Desire was… budget-friendly, perhaps, but intelligent in its use of a slideshow backdrop. Excerpts of White’s commentary were interpolated throughout by a narrator-figure. This gave us the virtue of White’s insights, but at the same time distracted from the efficacy with which his journalism allowed each character to speak for himself, in his own idiom and very much on his own terms. Choreography was as broad-ranging and substantial as the show itself – even including a Native American piece.

In a sense, States of Desire, for all its merits, is inevitably a historical tome, and to a degree I share White’s own incomprehension at why anyone would conceive a musical around it today. But Desire did much to justify the premise, odd as it might be. It – and especially its cast, among whom I might single out Michael Woodhams’s superlative delivery - deserve a wider, bigger production – and audience. Do keep your eyes peeled.


Richard Canning’s most recent book is E M Forster: Brief Lives (Hesperus Press. His 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read and Between Men 2 (both 2009), featuring McConnell, are published by Alyson Books.

Labels: Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 1:07 PM 0 comments

Theatre Review: The Importance of Being Earnest

Russell Dixon (Lady Bracknell), Photo by Gerry Murray

With this strangely delightful production the Library Theatre, for the moment at any rate, loses its home. It will leave the current venue, where it has been performing plays for over half a century, once the current run of The Importance of Being Earnest comes to an end.

Little, precious little, is taken seriously in Wilde’s great play; it can hardly keep a straight, or indeed an earnest face. Despite this jollity – and it almost goes without saying that it is a supremely entertaining play – there is an unflinchingly subversive reach on show here. Everything is mocked, all is fair game: Wilde’s wit shoots down all the conventions and core values of his age. And in doing so he makes us smile.

The masterstroke of this production is to cast Russell Dixon as Lady Bracknell: he is superb, a queerly arch gatekeeper. To have a man in the role of this senior, authoritative ma’am – and for it be unremarked upon by Algernon and the rest - casts a most peculiar light on proceedings

You knew where you were with Lady Bracknell, or at least you thought you did. She was the most strait-laced of Wilde’s creations. She was the one who pulled all the other characters into line, and into happy marriages. Now that we discover that she is a genderqueer matron, her moral compass seems decidedly dodgy. Or off kilter somewhat. Something is happening, but you don’t quite know what it is.

It is fun, though.

The doors have not closed quite yet, but it is clear that the Library Theatre has saved the best till last.

The Importance of Being Earnest is showing at the Library Theatre until 3 July. Don’t miss it.

Labels: Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 11:02 PM 0 comments

Theatre Review: MUST – The Inside Story

MUST – The Inside Story

By Suzy Willson and Peggy Shaw
Performed by Peggy Shaw


Fuel
Library Theatre Company, until 26 May 2010

Reviewed by Paul Kane


Shaw’s mesmerizing performance flowed from beginning to end.
She touched upon the body as intimate stranger, our own portion of nature. Her own body and what had happened to it (accident and injury), the manipulation of the bodies of those close to her (her mother’s ECT in the ‘50s, the recent death of her sister), the body of the earth.

In constraining identity and making what or who we are possible, the body is pretty much key. That much is obvious, perhaps too obvious. For it has until fairly recently (I’m thinking in particular of Maxine Steets-Johnstone’s work and the so-called ‘corporeal turn’) been curiously overlooked.

How Shaw worked: a stream of striking poetic images, delivered with panache. Gusto, a vividness of presence, is what she showed in abundance. There was music, also, and a series of archive medical images (of the heart and the microbiology of the blood and diverse innards) and an animation involving skeletons in a cemetery.

It is not often that a play or performance piece can so aptly be described as ‘excoriating’. Let us therefore rejoice in the fact that here the word fits like a glove. And let us also rejoice in the existence of the astounding Peggy Shaw.
MUST – The Inside Story is showing at the Library Theatre in Manchester until 26th May, as part of the Queer Up North festival.

Labels: Queer Up North, Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:56 PM 0 comments

Theatre Review: Road Movie

Road Movie

Written by Godfrey Hamilton and performed by Mark Pinkosh



Starving Artists
Library Theatre Company, until 22 May 2010

Reviewed by Paul Kane


The words you remember are 'I want a cure and I want my friends back' and they are spoken by Joel, Mark Pinosh's principal heteronym. Although a monologue, Pinkosh brings to life myriad characters in turn, Joel being the sole abiding presence.

Pinkosh is electric on stage, his face intense and incredibly expressive, his arms animated and urgent, as he brings Joel and Scott's story fully to life. Faux-naif and faux vain, he was. Despairing and then joking, playing the audience for all he was worth.

Those who help us are human too - they have only the same resources we do, no more. One take-home message.

'I want a cure and I want my friends back.' Yes, but if only one wish could be granted, which would you choose?

Road Movie is showing at the Library Theatre in Manchester until 22nd May, as part of the Queer Up North festival.

Labels: Queer Up North, Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 4:55 PM 0 comments

Theatre Review: Primavera presents Origin of the Species

Origin of the Species
Written by Bryony Lavery

Arcola Theatre, London
until November 21st 2009

Reviewed by Richard Canning


This is a seriously entertaining revival of a most intelligent and witty play. An early work of lesbian playwright Bryony Lavery, it’s a two-hander about Darwin’s theory of evolution, as the title suggests. This production, ably directed by Tom Littler and featuring excellent performances by Marjorie Yates as Molly and Clare-Hope Ashitey as Victoria, is thus also a timely treat, given the plethora of commemorations attending the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

The drama draws on the true story of Louis and Mary Leakey’s pioneering 1950s and 60s anthropological research into the Olduvai Gorge region of Tanzania, the so-called ‘cradle of mankind’, named for the prehistoric human remains uncovered there. Its ‘homo habilis’ is a precursor of homo erectus, who in turn morphed into our present-day species, ‘homo sapiens’. Lavery has Molly, a bluff, elderly Yorkshirewoman, recounting her time joining the Leakey digs, from which she has brought back several skulls, as well as (and at this point the plot slightly awkwardly abandons all verisimilitude for fantasy) a complete skeleton, which reconstitutes itself as a wild young black woman, speechless embodiment of this earliest form of man. Molly names her “Victoria” – after her grandmother, though, naturally, there are colonial cadences too – and befriends the young woman (though there’s no hint of anything more than friendship and kinship), schooling her in the English language (which proves relatively straightforward) and native customs and perceptions (much trickier).

The challenge must be – within this poignant, fundamentally comic scenario – to avoid the semblance of colonialist instruction detracting from the true lessons emerging from the couple’s exchanges, which are colour-neutral. Clearly, given the play’s intentionally absurd premise, it may seem churlish to insist on the dangers of interpreting Molly’s often patronising tutelage too literally, and in colour- and culturally-sensitive terms. Generally, the play steers a sensitive course through this problem. But there are moments where it struggles to provide an oppositional voice to Molly’s articulation of how the “primitive” in front of her might, and indeed will, develop into a fully-fledged homo sapiens; a near insurmountable difficulty, given Victoria’s struggle to master speech. There is one moment, though, in the first half, where she inadvertently trumps Molly’s ready cultural assumptions. A few more such rhetorical reversals would have strengthened the play’s fundamental determination to question “civilised values” in the round.

Bryony Lavery

The other chief way in which the play suggests that mankind’s evolution has not been the straightforward flight towards achievement and liberty comes in its striking final moments. Molly celebrates the arrival of the New Year, and, given that the play has been conceived around the idea of the entire history of Earth being mapped onto a single year, wonders whether mankind can survive after the clocks strike. “Mankind”, of course, is itself a provocative term, given the play’s other prominent theme: the male-centred nature of recorded human history, anthropological and otherwise. Molly concedes that, when she first uncovered Victoria, she had been looking for a man, specifically, not a woman; yet her delight in her ward causes her to question all manner of man-dominant ideas. Her education, she reveals, had been entirely devoted to the mantra: “man – him - his”. Victoria counters by revealing that it had been woman who first learnt how to take and use fire – a critical moment, obviously, in the development of the species - not man, as is traditionally recorded in myth.

The man-bashing is sometimes a little unabashed, or at least somewhat “period” in feel, and one senses that the playwright might have longed to push the Molly-Victoria relationship further, since, as it stands, the role played by sexual instinct in mankind’s development, isn’t glanced at. Still, Origin of the Species remains a witty, smart treatment of some complex ideas. The commendable production at the Arcola feels fully evolved.

Richard Canning is a writer and academic, based in London. His latest book is the edited collection Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson, 2009).

Labels: Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 1:18 AM 0 comments

Theatre Review: The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley

The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley
Written and Performed by Chris Goode

Contact Theatre, Manchester

Reviewed by Paul Kane


Without a doubt, this was the most beautiful and interesting play to be performed at the Queer Up North festival; already, perhaps, it should be regarded as a classic. Let’s go through a few reasons why it was overall so fine and copacetic.

First key point to make: it has an awful lot of charm. The set, Shirley’s bedroom, vividly evokes the mid to late ‘70s: Bowie’s Aladdin Sane poster on the wall and the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK poster too. (I’d query whether they have the correct Spider Man poster on the wall, mind: wasn’t that an Ultimate Spider Man poster I espied?) Adam Smith’s opening animation is involving and fun, elegant and expressive both. Then there is Chris Goode’s virtuoso performance.

Goode plays all the parts: the storyteller/narrator; Wound Man, a superhero whose special power is to contain, and therefore take away, others’ pain; Shirley, a teenage boy still mourning for his dead brother and struggling to come to terms with his sexuality; Reg Parsley, an ideal exemplar (or should that be an Exemplar Ideal?) of the Daily Mail’s target readership; and quite a few other characters too. Throughout, Goode is engaging and amiable, his humour often silly and outrageous.
The, it has to be said very English, charm of Goode’s piece allows him to get away with delivering a message that people may not want or like to hear: that a relationship between a teenage boy and an older man may be warm, affectionate, respectful and good for both. This is not an especially complex message, but it is maybe a transgressive one, in our paedophile-paranoid times. And that Goode should use the superhero/sidekick template to sweeten this truth will likely have old Doc. Wertham turning in his grave.

The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley is absolutely enchanting, a Pythonesque brew of Kes and Dennis Cooper, with perhaps just a smidgeon of Hellraiser too. It is the best piece of British Theatre since the Katie Mitchell and the NT’s Waves.


Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com

Labels: Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 6:32 AM 0 comments

Theatre Review: Eonnagata

Eonnagata
Conceived and performed by
Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage, Russell Maliphant

Sadler’s Wells, London
23 June - 27 June 2009

Review by Sophie Mayer


d’Eon defied all sorts of gender norms, including offering to lead a brigade of women against the Austrians. His/her biological sex remains an open question, and its this ambiguity that Eonnagata explores most appealingly, while never making light of the social challenges that d’Eon faced. All that sword- and stick-waving stands for inner conflict, absolutely, but also for a social conflict that could be paralleled to the American War of Independence or French Revolution, for the right of gender self-determination. Phallic and physically aggressive, the sticks also suggests the aspects of the old order threatened by d’Eon’s contingent fluidity, which raises three possibilities that disturb the Good Old Boys of the French government: that a woman could successfully achieve the same military and diplomatic success as a man; that a man may choose to forego male privilege and live as a woman; and, thirdly, that male and female identities aren’t so clear-cut as that, that they rest in a set of constructions and assumptions dependent on gendered codes of activities, attitude and costume.

It’s the costume, designed by Alexander McQueen, that allows for the most fun, and make clear the dizzying range of references at play in the show, from music hall to kabuki. The costumes are inherently theatrical, and they point to the theatricality of gender – and to the fact that theatre is a site where gender has often been blurred and contested. In the stick fight, onnagata meets Widow Twanky. The incidents that act as a framework – d’Eon’s frightening return to France and robing as a woman, for example – all comment specifically on how clothes maketh the (wo)man. Seductive, beautiful, surprisingly robust and agile, McQueen’s costumes make transvestism – or better, sartorial androgyny – seem both impossibly glamorous and attractively practical.

McQueen is known for his cutting and structure, and his costumes here reveal the bones beneath. Whether transparent kimonos or pastiched crinolines, the costumes are slashed and opened to allow the dancing body to move, and to be visible in its movements. Under their various guises, the three quick-change artists wear all-over leotards covered with a web of lines (deliciously, Guillem’s had a codpiece to shape her silhouette in accord with her fellow dancers). In a particularly eerie sequence in which an upturned table becomes a boat, a cell, a womb, a cradle (all places where we are thrown back on our bodies, and all analogies for the body) the lines glow blue with ultraviolet light, alien veins turning the body inside out.

In that, they are reminiscent of da Vinci’s tireless diagramming of the body. Lepage’s final pose – spreadeagled on a table that is d’Eon’s deathbed – is that of da Vinci’s universal man. But inverted. Simple, arresting, grounded, embodied: when it refused the ethereality of ballet (associated with Guillem as the ‘female’ Chevalier) Eonnagata offered a glimpse of a beguiling, shifting, playful yet politicised hybrid, a form that brilliantly mirrored its subject. But Guillem’s bite feminine should have been visible long before she took her bow; its promise – and its obfuscation – mark the two sides of this show that hasn’t quite found the unity of self that d’Eon clearly did.


Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Dance Review, Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 11:22 AM 0 comments

Theatre Review: Plague over England by Nicholas de Jongh

Plague over England.
Nicholas de Jongh.

Duchess Theatre, London
Booking to 19 May, 2009

Reviewed by John Dixon


There’s been an encouraging number of gay plays recently. Now here’s one produced last March on the fringe and revived in the West End - with a projected run till mid-May.

Plague over England concerns the arrest for soliciting of John Gielgud in 1953. The author is Nicholas de Jongh, whose study of homosexuality in the theatre, Not in Front of the Audience, well equips him to deal with the topic. He’s also a theatre critic, not necessarily a passport to being a playwright, even a play about theatre-land. Happily this is no biopic or star vehicle, no theatre-history self-indulgence or name dropping. The play gives the background to the purge, (an American Senate report categorising homosexuals as a threat to national security); the British Establishment’s response to Washington (by invoking a law that penalised men not for what they did but for what they appeared to wish to do) - and how this affected a recently-ennobled actor, who wasn’t even caught in the act, but merely smiled at a pretty entrapment officer.

The advantage of basing a play on this particular victim is that nothing is clear cut. Gielgud inhabits a double-world, between acting superbly well and being himself imperfectly. He’s unsure if he’s on- or off-stage. When arrested he doesn’t think to call a solicitor. He gives his profession as clerk, uses his first name, Arthur, that he’d dropped years before. He believes the police when assured that newspaper reporters never arrive for early morning court appearances. He’s astounded when the story breaks. Who knows about it? Who knew I was homo? How could they tell?

This naivety is caught from the start when Gielgud enters backstage rehearsing a play, lines of which foreshadow his own situation. The Mother figure, Sybil Thorndike, asks ‘When are you going to get married and settle down?’ Gielgud fluffs his lines, poo-poohs the role, and wonders why he agreed to appear in the play, rather than something contemporary.

In the postscript, twenty years later and after a seismic change in attitudes, (including the pretty policeman turning gay) Gielgud is shown accepting a role Pinter’s No Man’s Land, as a closet gay.

Several of the cast were from the original production. The lead, Michael Feast, resemblances Gielgud, in looks, dapper clothing, and voice. It can’t be easy playing another actor, even one you’ve worked with. It’s one thing for likes of Rory Bremner et al., to imitate celebrities for a couple of minutes; quite another to sustain a serious role throughout the evening and enter the nuances provided by the script.

The other actors – all excellent - had double-up roles. Celia Imrie as Sybil Thorndike and the very different proprietress of a gentlemen’s club; Simon Dutton as an Establishment lawyer and as the urbane theatrical producer, Binkie Beaumont. Poor David Burt was a lavatory attendant, newsvendor, camp barman and a valet!

The fixed set – dark polished wood - proved adaptable. Side doors led to a courtroom annex, ministerial offices, or cubicles. Two revolving panels – one for a wash-basin or dressing room table and mirror; the other for a urinal, drinks bar or desk – ensured quick scene changes.

Any limitations of the set were overcome off-stage. Gielgud stood front stage penitent, saying he’d been tired and drunk the night before, and the voice of the judge boomed out the sentence. The demonstration and the retirement party of the proprietress were off-stage. Most telling was the clapping that greeted Gielgud when he went from backstage (our stage) onstage for his first London appearance after the arrest. ‘Come on, John,’ said Sybil. ‘I’ll take you on. They wouldn’t dare boo me.’ There was a perceptible feel-good shuffle in the audience and an attempt to join in the clapping!

The worry is that the demands on the lead actor are such that the play may never reach the provincial or amateur repertoire. The impact and lesson of the work could be made wider and more lasting were a filmed version made available on video for sale, hire and in libraries.

Labels: Theatre Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 6:48 PM 0 comments