Various venues, Dublin
What do two concurrent festivals of gay theatre tell us about sexual identity today? Few would expect to find sharply rivalling notions about independence, families, tolerance, hostility or the politics of desire from the Absolut Gay Theatre Festival Dublin and the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. Indeed, their names alone suggest that such shared concerns can only be reordered and reiterated, but rarely evolved. But with neither entity featuring shows that brimmed over with production frills, such ideas are presented nightly with vigour on bare board stages.
Weepie, described almost apologetically by Performance Anxiety’s programme as “an early Chris Goode play”, takes the true story of a pair of teenagers who performed a vicious murder, apparently without motive, as its basis and ascribes to them a convoluted narrative of SAS-style preparations, meta-theatrical gameplay and a soup of pop-cultural references and arcane allusions. Mark Brewer and Jonny Collis-Scurll deliver understandably wired performances though an over-complicated text, which flips the action routinely to a TV interview with a 12th-century mystic. If the characters’ choked desire for one another has been sublimated into violent impulses, as the play clunkily suggests, the simplicity of that message is contained in a manic production from Donald Pulford, more grating than challenging.
South African stories, featured in both festivals, provide some interesting contrasts in depictions of tolerance and culture. "This is Cape Town," says Ashraf Johaardien's drag performer Lawrence in The Myth of Andrew and Jo, as though settling an argument: "Everybody's gay." In the comfortable world of Artscape's brightly realised production he may be right, as one of two gay men and two lesbians who form an implausible family unit. But what would those words mean to Pam Ngwabeni in Peter Hayes's monologue Kiss The Women, which details intolerance and brutal hate crimes against lesbians in a township in Cape Town? Both productions weave through enlivening stage devices and warmly engaging performances to reach an uplifting conclusion, but as unlikely parents-to-be Andrew and Jo push towards mainstream assimilation ("the chance of a real life . . . away from the pink lifestyle") and Ngwabeni concludes with a rhapsody of football and lesbian love-making, it's the latter contentment that is much harder won.
Performed as an open diary of personal history, sexual attraction and gender-role considerations, Kimberly Dark's Dykeotomydetails the disorientation of a self-professed "old-school femme dyke" who is alarmed to find other femmes hitting on her. As she recalls a contented sexual life with butch women – "I don't want to play the girl. I'm always the girl" – she wonders if she has become "gender normative", and gently rues the shrinking of her dating pool as former lovers alter their sex.
Dark may pepper her monologue with light academic terms, but her conversational and occasionally lyrical delivery is more telling. Orientation and desire won’t cleave to norms or textbooks. Once again, we learn that there are no laws of attraction.
All shows conclude on May 15
