LONDON CITY NIGHTS: LGBT

Friday, May 4, 2018

Review: 'Grotty' at The Bunker, 3rd May 2018

Friday, May 4, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Grotty reviewed by David James
Rating: 4 Stars

I don't know much about the London lesbian scene, but judging by Grotty it's a psychosexual pressure cooker crammed full of cynical, predatory weirdos. Written by and starring Izzy Tennyson, this semi-autobiographical story follows Rigby, an awkward 22-year-old scene newbie doing her best to navigate a tangled web of bitchery and broken hearts.

Rigby spends most of the play bouncing like a pinball between two women's beds; Toad (Rebekah Hind) is maternally overpowering while Witch (Grace Chilton) is into pretty much everything dark and depraved, though appears to mostly get her kicks from causing shame and embarrassment in her partners. Witch and Toad were also once engaged, so uh, that'd be awkward if they found out they now share Rigby.

But the white-hot core of Grotty is Rigby: one of the most fascinating characters I've seen in a very long time. Hunch-backed, twitchy, tongue pressed awkwardly into her lower lip, clad in charity shop sportswear - she behaves like someone who spent her childhood in a Harry Harlow isolation box. Her dialogue is a rat-a-tat stream-of-consciousness, winding its way through suicidal self-loathing, incisive observations and amphetamine fuelled paranoia.

Rigby is a grotesque in the nicest possible way, reminding me of some of the darker work of Peter Cook or maybe The League of Gentlemen. Despite her being a caricature amidst a cast of (relatively) realistic characters, the character brims over with pathos, empathy and wit. The other women in the play are drawn to her malleable vulnerability, seeing her as a woman-shaped-flesh-puppet they can mould to their sexual specifications and discard when things get boring. It leaves her unfulfilled and confused - perhaps most touchingly when she asks the hard-edged lesdom fanatic Witch for a simple hug.

Rigby's viewpoint (and I have to assume Tennyson's too) of London's lesbian scene isn't particularly charitable. These takedowns comprise the funniest moments in the play, from bemoaning the omnipresent R&B soundtrack, to the fact that lesbian nights tend to be midweek ("Who goes out on a Wednesday?!"), to the preponderance of bicurious Goldsmiths graduates in pixie haircuts called Annabelle who are there to vicariously play at being different rather than find a shag.

It's a breath of fresh air to see a show about lesbians that's so aggressively deromanticised. A lot of right-on shows that feature lesbian relationships (even ones written by women) have the vague odour of the male gaze about then - with a tacit understanding that there's something intrinsically erotic about lesbians. Grotty comprehensively dispels that, feeling custom-designed to deliver a warts and all insight into the dull sexual drudgery that really goes on behind closed doors.

The show's insights are uniformly excellent, but sadly it comes a little unstuck narratively. This is mainly down to the core narrative concluding, but the play continuing on with an inessential 15-minute epilogue. This marks a tonal shift that does the play no favours: the jokes dry up, the pace slows down and we just don't learn much new about the characters. It's a bit of a structural headscratcher - as if there's a lack of confidence that the previous 70 minutes or so hadn't communicated its message well enough (it did).

Anyhows, that doesn't get in the way of Grotty's obvious qualities. It's handsomely directed, staged, soundtracked and contains a bevvy of great performances (I love the way Grace Chilton delivers the dead-eyed nonchalant stare of the truly committed pervert). But it's Izzy Tennyson's night and while Grotty is not without its flaws, it's a great performative and literary showcase for a serious theatrical talent.

Grotty is at The Bunker until 26 May. Tickets here.

Friday, July 29, 2016

'Rotterdam' at Trafalgar Studios, 28th July 2016

Friday, July 29, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Rotterdam sucks. Granted, that's mainly because the Nazis dropped 1,300 bombs on it in one night. With its medieval city centre wiped off the face of the earth, the way was paved for a present of anony-corporate skyscrapers, shopping centres as far as the eye can see and a clawing vacuum where a personality should be. With Utrecht and Amsterdam only forty minutes away by train, why would anyone stay in Rotterdam?

This is the thorny question facing Rotterdam's characters, each of whom is trapped there in a sadistic social and romantic oubliette of their own devising. The core are Alice (Alice McCarthy) and Fiona (Anna Martine), two British women who're deeply in love. Along for the ride is Josh (Ed Eales-White), Fiona's older brother. Complicating matters is that Alice came to Rotterdam as Josh's girlfriend, but was immediately smitten on meeting his sister, who subsequently moved over.

In the opening scene, Fiona throws a bomb into this dynamic. She explains that she's always felt like a man in a woman's body and is planning to undergo a gender transition. Henceforth she will be known as Adrian. With her once-girlfriend looking and behaving ever more masculine, Alice is in a bind. If she's a lesbian but her girlfriend is now a man, does that make her heterosexual? If she's in love with Fiona, does that mean she's automatically in love with Adrian?

The situation proves quite the pickle, compounded by the arrival of the hyper-neon, ultracool 21 year old Dutch lesbian Lelani (Jessica Clarke), who oozes the feminine sexuality that Alice feels deprived of.

It's a plot set-up that never feels remotely contrived, and no doubt analogues of this situation have taken place in countless hetero/homo relationships - be it a woman explaining her need to live as a man or vice versa. Playwright Jon Brittain displays a reassuringly extensive knowledge of trans issues, from the physical and emotional effects of the person undergoing transition to the reactions of those around them.

These days its trendy (almost cliche) to state that gender is performative. In an ideal world Fiona's transition into Adrian is just be someone donning a set of gender signifiers that tessellate better with their psychology. Rotterdam explains that it's not as simple as that; coming from the angle that Fiona is essentially dead after the transition and that there's a new person, Adrian, in her place. Sure Adrian looks similar to Fiona, has the same memories and same basic personality, but they're quintessentially not the same person.

No-one envies Alice having to deal with this - her fears communicated in powerful monologues where she bemoans the social pressure to be tolerant and supportive of people expressing their true gender identity (despite any knock-on emotional consequences for you), worries about whether she can be attracted to a man and angrily reacts to her own sexual identity being redefined without her consent. When the play grapples with these questions about gender, identity and sexuality, it's effective, intelligent and dead serious.

Mercifully, the rest of the time it's goddamn hilarious. Generally maintaining a sharply comic tone, there's at least five or six humongous gags that go off like a rocket. It's always a good sign when your actors have to pause for a moment before delivering their next line to wait for the audience to stop laughing. Some of these come from the more straightforwardly comic characters of Lelani and Josh, both gentle caricatures that bustle on the borders of the core relationship. Some simply arise without a punchline, as the audience collectively figures something out and laughs that they hadn't noticed it before. It's rare to see a comedy this finely balanced - script and performances polished until they shimmer.

All four actors turn in carefully judged performances. Jessica Clark's Lelani injects a jolt of manic energy whenever she appears. Ed Eales-White's Josh is wry but shows a heart a mile wide, quietly suppressing his own feelings in order to support two women he deeply cares for.

In Alice, Alice McCarthy gives us a fully rounded performance, her stress, confusion and general emotional exhaustion combining to make a relatable, likeable woman. I was sat in the front row, getting to see her performance close-up (so close she actually kicked me in the knee). I particularly enjoyed her obvious frustration that her own mini-drama (struggling to come out to her parents) is ridden over roughshod by the more attention-grabbing gender transition.

But you've got to single out Anna Martine's boldly aggressive, intensely vulnerable Fiona/Adrian. A striking physical presence from the get go, she moves with a nervy electricity that makes her happiness infectious and her despair crush like a mace. As the effects of transition take hold, her behaviour subtly shifts towards what initially feels like a caricature of masculinity, toying with audience sympathies. These tectonic character shifts are the fulcrum on which Rotterdam turns: it's difficult to imagine the character being done better than this.

My only criticisms are a couple of overly didactic conversations that have a tinge of being transplanted from books/articles encountered during research and an ending that didn't quite stick the landing. It nearly did, but for me something frustratingly indefinable felt off.

Still, by any standards this is a marvellous piece of drama. I was gutted to miss it at it's original run in Theatre503 and pleased when I heard of this (entirely deserving) West End transfer. Rotterdam is the kind of drama that people will look back on in years to come: neatly encapsulating the explosion of identity malleability that've marked sexuality in the 2010s. All but essential.

★★★★

Rotterdam is at Trafalgar Studios until 27 August. Tickets here.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

‘Just Me, You and the Silence’ at the Old Vic, 4th November 2012

Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

‘Just Me, You and the Silence’ by Judy Adong is a play with noble aims, and one which sets its sights high. It's about LGBT rights in Uganda, one of the most cripplingly repressive places in the world to be gay or lesbian. Homosexual activity, both male and female, is illegal, and gays and lesbians must live with routine discrimination and legal restrictions. There is also an underlying risk of physical harassment; newspapers such as ‘Red Pepper’ and ‘Rolling Stone’ have published lists of names and addresses of gay Ugandans while calling for them to executed. One of the people named, David Kato, a prominent LGBT rights and advocacy officer for SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda) was beaten to death with a hammer in his home in January 2011. On top of all this misery, there's been repeated attempts to introduce legislation popularly known as the “Kill the Gays bill”, which calls for the death penalty for anyone committing ‘the offence of aggravated homosexuality’.

This is not a very bright and breezy situation, to say the least. Imagine what it is like to live in constant fear of your safety, never knowing who to trust and where members of your government are actively seeking to implement legislation that might result in you standing, rope resting around your shoulders, black hood on head, hearing the muffled sounds of people around you and then the soft click of the trapdoor opening and sudden weightlessness and then? The best you could hope for is they kill you cleanly. So when I went out on a chilly November night to see a play about LGBT issues in Uganda I wasn’t expecting a very cheery night out.

Not cool guys!

And yet I laughed my head off nearly all the way through it. It’s a consciously funny play from start to finish, and ridiculously entertaining. This was in many ways a huge relief. I try to keep informed as to what’s going on in the African LGBT community, and I care deeply about the issues underlying situations like those currently happening in Uganda. So before seeing the play I was worrying what I’d write about it if it was awful, or even if it was just crushingly miserable throughout. Adding to this mild sense of dread was that this wasn’t even a full production. It was a benefit reading, which means uncostumed actors standing in a row with lecterns in front of them and reading from scripts, as far as I could tell totally unrehearsed. So if a play has flaws, they're only going to be exaggerated.

Fortunately Adong clearly knows what the hell she’s doing. Vile though it is, much of the language, rhetoric and logic behind the “Kill the Gays Bill” is ridiculous enough to stray into the realm of the darkly funny. If you want to prick somebody’s self-importance, then making them into a figure of fun is one of the more effective ways of doing it. Here, Adong deftly confronts the supporters of these monstrous bills with the logical consequences of their actions.

It's horrifying. But language like this has got to be ripe for satire.

‘Just Me, You and the Silence’ tells the story of a Ugandan MP named Jacob Obina (seemingly based on David Bahati MP) and his family. Jacob and his wife Grace are aspirational social climbers and Jacob sees introducing a strict anti-homosexuality bill as his ticket to a life of luxury and fame. His cohorts in this are Pastor Ddumba (based on Martin Ssempa) and Mary Rose who run a church, and Buntu Muntu (an analogue for Simon Lokodo), a government minister. All see this bill as a way to propel them on a wave of popular sentiment forward in life. Less enthusiastic are Jacob's two sons: Giden just wants to be left alone to get on with a budding music career, and Mathias wants to escape to New York to attend university.

What drives the narrative is that Mathias is secretly gay. He’s torn between loyalty to his mother and father, who are wholly reliant on the passing of the anti-gay laws for financial security, and his activist friends Victoria and Thomas who are underground LGBT political activists.

If this unlikely situation were played seriously it would feel pretty contrived and cloying. But Adong recognises the farcical elements inherent to the situation, and almost every twist and turn the story takes is milked for laughs. I thought it was interesting that those trying to enact the anti-gay legislation are not necessarily portrayed as cackling, cartoon villains. They merely see this bill as the most expedient way to get what they want out of life. Jacob in particular is a likeable and funny man, which makes it very jarring when he slips into rabidly anti-gay language. This humanising process is a clever way to approach the situation. An aggressive front-on attack would be totally justified and very cathartic but also unlikely to change anyone’s mind. But while the play never shirks from presenting a powerful and convincing argument it does so with a relatively light touch, and with good humour.

In fact, I was so taken aback by how funny the play was and how readily the audience embraced it as a comedy that for a while I felt a bit uneasy. We are laughing at situations that, while they may sound utterly ridiculous to the ears of a London theatre audience, are deadly serious to a Ugandan gay person desperately frightened of being outed.

Judy Adong

The genesis production was when Adong was confronted by the discrepancy between what Ugandan politicians and media said gay people were like, and her personal experience of meeting and working a gay man:

“This experience made me see that the value of a human being is not measured by his or her sexuality. It also made me realise that one day I could wake up and find someone I knew and loved being put to the noose and I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Like so many Ugandans, I had been in denial that anyone I knew could be gay.” – Judy Adong

The notion of the homosexual as the other, the outsider or the interloper seems to run right through the anti-gay propaganda put forward by the church and state. Gay people are painted as un- African and as trying to actively convert people’s children to the ‘gay cause’. We see the characters in this play actively engaging in this othering, explaining in a wickedly funny sequence how to ‘spot a gay man’ by his clothes or behaviour. All the while, the father in the play unknowingly holds up his gay son Mathias as a shining example of African manhood. We have it demonstrated to us in the clearest possible way the consequences of assuming that it's other people’s children or family members who are gay. It's this message that stands out over all else, and the play asks: how would you feel if it was your son or daughter whose neck was in the noose?

Its important to consider why this notion of the destructive other in society has such a strong pull in Ugandan society. Uganda is a former British colony, gaining independence from Britain in 1962 and like many former colonies is fiercely (and in my opinion rightly) protective of its right to self-governance. Interference from the West is regarded with intense suspicion, and financial aid often comes with strings attached. Gay rights are commonly viewed as a prime example of Western cultural imperialism; at best an example of an overly secular too-liberal West, and at worst an active attempt to poison the well of African masculinity. This allows anti-gay campaigners to seductively frame their arguments as an integral part of Ugandan or pan-African nationalism.

Adong exposes the hypocrisy of this argument through the character of Pastor Ddumba. He is shown as being in the thrall of a US megachurch who keep him on a tight leash through their funding of his church. Pastor Ddumba is generally fairly authoritative throughout most of the play, so it’s pretty funny to see him become so obsequious and grovelling whenever he has to talk to his US financier over the phone. This relationship seems to be based on the real-life links between the Nevada Canyon Ridge megachurch, and Martin Ssempa, who Ddumba parodies. The argument goes that the US evangelical right sees the war on homosexuality in the US as pretty much a lost cause, and are far happier to fight a proxy war on homosexuality in Africa. So, we see him going from decrying foreign interference in one scene, to frantically licking the boot of the US evangelicals in the next. What’s nice is that the play never preaches this to us, but any thinking person watching it can draw their own conclusions pretty easily. The most persuasive thinker we know, after all, is ourselves.

From the Ugandan Gay Pride Parade (!!) in 2012 - these are very brave people.

Considering that these actors who had very little (if any) rehearsal time, the quality of the performances was excellent. Deserving particular praise is David Gyasi as Jacob, and Arnold Oceng as his son Giden. Both of them very quickly defined their characters not just as well-rounded, but also very as likeable people. Even from behind a lectern and with a script in their hands they gave us a peek into the physicality of these characters, which makes the play that much funnier and the characters more relatable. I had feared that a read through of a play would be a dry, academic exercise, but they breathed life into the story even with very limited resources.

Despite this being a very fast-moving, entertaining play there are a few slow patches. At various points the play lapses into fantasy sequences where we get a visualisation of a particular character’s fantasy life. So for example we see Grace, Jacob’s wife dreaming of being interviewed as First Lady and treated as an iconic political and cultural figure. It’s a nice way of getting into the character’s heads and helping us understand their motivations, but these scenes bring the narrative to a screeching halt, and ultimately we're being shown things we should have already worked out for ourselves. The only other criticism I’d make is that throughout the play we have someone to the side of the stage reading aloud the stage directions. This was fine, but in the final moments of the play he read out a direction for a minute’s silence. I can’t see any reason why they couldn’t actually do the minute’s silence in the read through rather than simply tell us about it. Not having any silence before the end totally undercut the drama and profundity of the last line of the play, which is a shame.

But these are minor criticisms and this was a wonderful night. Judy Adong has provided gay rights campaigners in Uganda with a potent weapon in their fight against homophobia. The play is funny and entertaining while also having a white-hot core of anger and righteousness. Her ambition is to perform this play in Kampala, Uganda and I firmly believe that one day she will achieve her dream. As this work amply demonstrates, it is not homosexuality that tears the fabric of society apart; it is bigotry, divisiveness and ignorance.

It’s a relief to be able to highly recommend this play not just because I wholeheartedly believe in its message, but because it’s also highly insightful and hilarious satire with excellent characterisation.

Many thanks to the wonderful people at the Old Vic who donated their beautiful theatre for the reading and to the actors and production staff who gave up their free time to work unpaid for our entertainment. If anyone would like to know more about this issue please check out the Kaleidoscope Trust. They organised this night and are an excellent organisation that does sterling and brave work.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS