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Author: Eric Page

REVIEW: ‘The Whispering Dome’ by BREMF

Posted on by Eric Page

Review by Lisa Newnham

This was a great idea and an ambitious project bringing together many different disciplines, voices, and instruments along with younger people from local schools. Although promoted as a multimedia this was in effect a screen at the back of the stage with projection, which changed throughout with different images, maps and edited video snippets. The main narrative being the emigratory path of the nightingale.

The migration was suggested via the screen – we see a map, then the bird outline flies to different places, and when it alights, we had a piece of music associated with that place. We started on a simple farm in Norfolk, then set off; the flight following our birds out of Sussex with music from the medieval Lewes Breviary; across France with Clément Janequin’s wonderfully quirky Le chant des oiseaux; through Spain and Portugal with the extraordinary Lamentations by João Lourenço Rebelo; before pausing at the interval and then leaping across the sea to Morocco for fabulous traditional songs about birds; and finally settling to The Gambia and the stunning music for voice and kora belonging to the ancient Griot traditions.

The nightingale was called Billie, some of the music had bird associations, whilst drifting off to some rather delightful lamentations: ‘Forest fires south of Lisbon on the way to Cádiz’. I reflected how little regional texture there was in the early European music selection. I felt it lacked a national topographical distinction to the musical pieces selected, I could follow the geography of the migration through the projection and programme, but this distinction felt lacking in the music itself.

At the beginning, before the bird sets off, children from Elm Grove and Westdene Primary schools formed a children’s choir, performing a fun song created by director Jeremey Avis called Eating Worms. It seemed as if half the audience were parents of the younger people as there was surge of phones to video the moment. It’s good to see children included in an early music festival event and BREMF are to be applauded for engaging with this audience and demographic in this authentic and inclusive way. This was a fun way of ensuring a family event involved younger peoples having positive experiences of early music.

Later on the children joined in the call with the African performers; Simo Lagnawi, representing Morocco, playing the guembri – a three stringed skin-covered bass plucked lute used by the Gnawa people, the size of a guitar, with a body carved from a log and covered on the playing side with camel skin. Joining them in this bouncy ‘call and response’ was Suntou Susso playing the Kora – a harp-lute with 22 strings – which is unique to the Mandinka people of West Africa and The Gambia.

These stunning musicians with their unique instruments along with two different choirs, and a quartet – Horizon Voices – stepped in and out of the performance spaces mixing and exchanging tempos, rhythms and ambience before they came together just before the interval in an emotive newly commissioned piece called Two Weeks. The whole company came together to sing, summing up an idea of human migration and movements of people. The music here was effective and moving, bringing a range of voice and experience to the stage all at once.

Abruptly the visuals changed into startling images of African refugees and migrants wrapped in silver blankets being ‘tended to’ by Europeans. I felt there might have been a more subtle and powerful way of presenting human migrations across the Mediterranean. The sheer desperation and hardships of refugees can not be usefully represented by such ‘stock footage’ that we see on the news, and which itself contains a subtext which does not respect the dignity of such struggles and the people that undertake them. After all, nightingales and humans have migrated for thousands of years – Billie the bird knows no borders and nations are a human invention.

You can see a full list of cast, creative and the music performed in this evening in the programme here:

Brighton Community Choir joined in to sing specially create music for the event. It was good to hear such a wide range of voices and different choirs taking part – it made the whole event feel like a well-developed community event. The different types of early music contrasted well with the traditional instrumental music from Africa, interlaced with commissioned pieces of music from composer and director Jeremy Avis

The African performers and musicians were a real highlight of the event, lifting the whole performance and shifting the Eurocentric focus of many early music events and reminded us that these traditional instruments have been in use widely as long as European early musical traditions. It felt like a successful family-oriented melding of BREMF and WOMAD.

Lagnawi and Susso interacted exceptionally with the younger members of the ensemble and injected real energy into the performance bringing to life the ‘call and response’ and giving the younger people an opportunity to take part in something special with internationally renowned musicians.

This was an ambitious community event with much to celebrate and enjoy with a few areas which could have been more polished, with clearer journey and native avian narratives.

BREMF continues across the city until the end of the month and you find out more, and book events on their website here: 

REVIEW: Secret Byrd @ BREMF

Posted on by Eric Page

Secret Byrd

Friday 13 October

St Bartholomew’s Church

BREMF

Brighton Early Music Festival

 

Review by Lisa Newnham

Director, writer, and composer Bill Barclay – Artistic Director of Concert Theatre Works brings a mediation into belief and the sacred via an immersive staged Mass celebrating the 400-year legacy of William Byrd in the vast vaulted spaces of St Bartholomew’s Church.

England’s finest composer was a covert Catholic facing brutal prosecution, this performance offers us Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices as he intended: sung for private worship in strictest secrecy. The Gesualdo Six and Fretwork collaborate for the first time in a theatrical seance by candlelight.  This new work invites secular and religious audiences alike to commune with some of the most ravishing music ever written, recreating the music (and the spiritual intensity) of forbidden Catholic worship at the height of England’s golden age.

Lit by real candles, not electric candles, offering up an immediate authentic ambience. You cannot replace the smell, warmth and authenticity of candle lit space with a battery flickering. The purpose of this event to catapult you back into the 16th century.

Singers dressed in period costumes move about the space, with one greeting us to explain and welcome us into this experience to be shared. There are olde text panels from the director exploring the narratives arranged around the church space allowing people to wander and learn at their own pace.

In the middle of the space a dais with a round table is set up like a dining table, this is where most of the ‘action’ takes place. The music is from viol consort Fretwork who are arranged in front of the huge marble alter in St Barts with the singers slowly moving around the space, holding candles, with their voices coming from different directions.  We are thus very close to the singers, an utterly magical feeling, right in the middle of these supreme refined polyphonic harmonies, and can clearly hear them all flowing, folding and coming together.

We sat, silently in awe of the candlelit thrill unfolding around us.

It’s clear that the secret mass would have happened somewhere perhaps more intimate than the echoing halls of St Barts, but the singers produced a sense of intimacy by being so close together that we are drawn in and feel private and collaborating. What we may have lost in intimacy we gained with the whole of the huge acoustic space of St Bartholomew’s ringing with their pure harmonic tones and end notes just hanging in the air, as if the whole immense space was vibrating with their sounds. Divine.

The mass is reenacted with Owain Park director & leader of the The Gesualdo Six singers dressed as the priest, and although there were moments where the acting may falter, it’s carried totally by the shimmering brilliance of the music and singers. They are captivating, assured and project heavenly voices into the space.

Photo by Mark Allan

While they sit and sing around the central table, members of the audience, women and men, are invited up to the table, this extends the feeling of an intimate mass. At one point everyone up at table hold hands whilst the ensemble sing.

I felt that this invoked the quiet mystical oneness of a mass, the sacred mixed carefully with the performance and allowing the dignity of the mass to lay alongside the beauty of the entertainment.

The profound foundational bass and shimmering stratospheric counter tenors made me catch my breath, but here all the singers and musicians are on point, pulling this music out of history and breathing into it a deep sense of life.

Suddenly there was loud banging on the doors, loud, intimidating, all the candles are blown out. We are discovered, we are exposed, and we understand how forbidden and dangerous this perfect musical observation would have been to those attending it.  It’s a defining moment. Silence falls, the audience whispering, director Barclay cunningly evokes the perilous reality of the times.

Sacred things are cleared away quickly, but the singing gradually continues with the candles  flicking to life around us.

This delightful dramatic and semi-promenade performance is a superb way of introducing the history and beauty of early music in its historical context. If you were new to BREMF (or early music) last night was a fantastic introduction to the quality of the music, where you get to experience not only how ethereal this polyphonic singing is, but where and how it developed its sense of tranquillity.

Some of the audience, who had pre booked, received steaming bowls of soup and bread on trays brought out by the singers, all adding to the sense of intimacy sharing.

The Secret Mass is an example not just of music historically underlying spiritual belief but of  performance supporting the ability to suspend belief and feeling an understanding – from a secular perspective – of the tremulous insubstantial elements of faith, just as the notes lay shimmering in the high ethereal vaults of St Barts.

The Secret Mass was a  beautiful opening gig to BREMF presented in an accessible and interesting setting, with this sacred music made tangible, illustrating the historical context of this music.

We left rearranged inside, grounded but also up in the air and floated out into the autumnal air full of hope. BREMF have really brought a very familiar piece of music out into an audience made up of purists, and first timers, giving everyone something to sigh over.

Full programme, cast and creative list for Secret Byrd here

BREMF runs until Sat 28th October  see the full programme of exciting events on their website here.

There are almost always prom tickets held back for performance’s so check directly with them if you’re interested in going along.

 

 

OPERA REVIEW: Peter Grimes @ London Coliseum (English National Opera)

Posted on by Eric Page

Review by Eric Page

David Alden’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s first major opera was last at the Coliseum in 2014, this second revival is a night of grim fascinations.

Taken from the Victorian poem The Borough by George Crabbe, the plot of Grimes is grim indeed, he’s a rough bully from a mean family without much sympathy and in the habit of ruthlessly beating his young apprentices. Britten reworks Grimes into a misunderstood loner; a strong complex individual against a closed, narrow minded, suspicious community, but he still beats the young men, they still die.

There’s been endless conjecture and analysis of the fact that this opera reflects the queer pacifist’s nature of Britten and his partner, but here it’s more about the small-minded closed nature of British small-town life and its brutal rejection of difference than about the freedom of choice and personal complexity. There is also the clear echoes of the whipped up culture wars, misinformed mob motivated by whispered gossip and rumours, the world – Britten’s world- gone mad.

Read the synopsis here:

©-Tom-Bowles

David Alden directs this dark and deep production as it swirls in the grey mists of some mean pinched post-war weary world. This is wide brush desolate fishing community, the set design from Paul Steinberg is rusty corrugated iron and hash lighting and the tight brutal focus is on the music and singing; everything is pared down, brutish and short.

Although flat and dull in materials, its lack of coloured detail makes it dramatically vivid. The textural lighting from Adam Silverman, and prim austerity palate costumes from Brigitte Reiffenstuel, drag the colour out of our eyes, beaching us in a claustrophobic but wide open landscape.

©-Tom-Bowles

Gwyn Hughes Jones as Grimes is lumpen, difficult, and overwhelmed by life, changing textures and volume of his singing to share the descent of Grimes into paranoia and madness, but he never fully convinces until the madness descends. His foil in Elizabeth Llewellyn as Ellen Orford is exceptional, bringing real life and a spark of individual reason to this world of conformity and non-thinking mob action and reaction.

Llewellyn’s sharp scalpel of a voice offering no soft spaces to hide from her truth, until it’s too late, then she sores – filling the auditorium, full of warmth and hope. Together, we know they are dammed but Llewellyn’s majestic acting keeps the ultimate conclusion from us with her complex and conflicted emotional attachment.

©-Tom-Bowles

Christine Rice as the creepy, mysterious lesbian Aunty is a crepuscular delight too, like a nightmare Aunt Sally, all rouge and roughish charm, her voice cuts to the quick of this opera and keeps us focused on the narrative tide as it flows and floods to its morbid conclusion. She holds the space and our eyes whenever on stage and her voice is as beguiling as the butch, lithe strutting. Ever-shadowed by her creepy hyper erotic nieces, danced hypnotically by Cleo Lee-McGowan and Ava Dodd, who appear to have slipped in from The Shinning and get a bit too much focus on occasion.

Veteran Anne-Marie Owens as opium addicted Mrs Sedley is the hissing judgmental voice of the mob, and is as nasty and unkind, and oddly vulnerable as the role allows.

All the solo Borough singers are wonderful, owning their cranky perverted characters, there’s not one weak voice among them and this casting provided a night of thrilling engagement with the audience.

The ENO chorus are worth swooning over in this production, their diction shrill and perfect, their movements as tight and nerve tingling as the singing and they bring a real sense of menace and fear to the night’s events. They are a human storm of contempt, each one clearly bonkers, they rise above the thin lyrics with harsh synchronised physical movement.

They snarl and jeer, catcall and howl their collective judgement on Grimes and all his supposed crimes against the town; I found them difficult to endure as they build to a terrible, vicious, vital mob. As a gay man, another outsider, this is a difficult opera to watch without squirming. They spat it out, all of them; it was terrific and terrible at the same time, quite a perfect piece of staging. I was aghast at them. Their hounding of Grimes is relentless.

©-Tom-Bowles

Martyn Brabbins is in full control of the orchestra; they are terrifying and majestic, powering through the music with energetic wrath. He weaves the complex musical tapestries of this music allowing the seascapes of Britten’s music to flow, the famous sea interludes welling up to shift direction of the story, his passionate conducting really makes the music shine. The full orchestra joining the cast on stage was a much deserved acknowledgement of their superb musical finery.

This is an astonishingly good revival and highly recommended. It all falls into place and makes this a utterly absorbing, unnerving but thrilling evening out at the ENO, not a fun one, but one which will leave you wide eyed and breathless and happy to live somewhere outside the world of The Borough’s thuggish folk. Walking out into a sparking wet St Martins Lane, the brooding crowds of a dark September night have never looked so grey or felt so dangerous.

I’m no fan of Britten but this production is a real winner on a number of levels, with the raw power of the ENO chorus to make this a breathless event of pure theatrical electrical energy, Book now, I said now.

Until 11th October

Tickets from £10, to book or more info or to book tickets see the ENO website here:

©-Tom-Bowles

 

 

BOOK REVIEW: ‘DRAG: A British History’ by Jacob Bloomfield

Posted on by Eric Page

Words by Eric Page

One of the great joys of this book is the delightful stories unearthed, along with the academic rigour in the uncovering and presentations of some of history’s great drag performers. Mostly unremembered now, but enormously popular during their time, ‘national treasures’ in many ways and completely integrated into the life of the theatre and expectations of the paying public.

Bringing these wonderful characters, and their quotes, to our gayze is a joy and Bloomfield is to be danced around the block for taking such care to present these lives in context, while always keeping a shady focus on the drag, or female impersonation as it’s often been framed.

I loved reading about how in 1906, American drag entertainer and vaudeville star Julian Eltinge travelled to England, performing for an enraptured King Edward VII at Windsor Castle, or the Les Rouges et Noirs, the drag troupe composed of men who fought in the First World War and was the subject of the second ‘talkie’ film produced in Britain. The length of their performances, the love letters sent to them, their acts of heroism during the war, all delightful.

Drag was always a focus of public discussions around gender – from Victorian sex scandals to the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960s. This book deftly demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness, contextualising its performers, while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage. It many examples of establishment drag performers a full bellied clarion call against those who would suggest drag is a modern phenomenon.

This wide, diverse breadth of drag performers and personas who appear continuously, without pause throughout British history from the early 17th century is testament to their popularity with the public. Even the great Wars of the 20th century couldn’t stifle drag, in fact it spurred it on to greater heights becoming a welcomed staple of wartime entertainment for the masses. Bloomfield emphatically shows us that drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture despite its transgressive associations.

The book takes us by the manicured gloved hand and chronologically leads us, via clubs, shows, scandals, politics, intrigue, to some rather delicious queer individuals and the way they used drag to succeed and flourish on stage whilst making strong pertinent socially informed humour a expected and publicly adored stage craft. The books opens with an evening at a Drag Revue in the company of the theatrical censor in 1958, giving insight into how the theatre was morally policed before the social revolutions of the 1960s. We learn about where and how performers flourish and how different the perceptions of men dressing up as women were from our current assumptions of Drag=Gay.

Danny La Rue, the Grand Celtic Dragosaurus, who dominated high camp via formal drag for decades, a sailor from Cork who reinvented himself as 7ft of ostrich feathers, lamé, sequins, and heels and ended up with his own club, shows, TV specials and the longest running panto in the world. Oh yes, he did! All the while pursing his immaculately lippied lips and ‘tutting’ at the ‘permissive society’ appearing around him.

The very short final chapter of the book looks at radical drag and how that’s been reclaimed by queer and gay communities.

Let’s make it clear that this is a British book about British drag and British entitlement and British privilege and a mighty bit of research it is too, the whole of the last third of the book is taken up with notes to all the chapters, bibliographies, index etc. However, the care taken on uncovering and compiling the glorious performers shared within its covers more than makes up for its learned presentation. The choice of font is also on the small side. Choices….

This is a great history of drag in the UK, both comprehensive and hugely informative, sharing not only wonderful stories and revitalising almost lost performers but also politically and sociality contextualising drag and empowering us to make informed observations about the current toxic and utterly fabricated ‘moral panic’ about drag today.

For anyone absorbed in the UK’s relationship with men dressing as female facsimiles for entertainment, this will be the go-to book; for those of us looking to spice up our conversations with delicious almost implausible and sometime jaw-droppingly camp info about drag in days gone by it’s pretty cool poolside reading.

Out now in Hardback, £25. 

For more info or to buy the book see the publisher’s website here:

BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Gaudy Image’ by William Talsman

Posted on by Eric Page

Words by Eric Page

An American queer classic, originally published in Paris by the legendary Olympia Press in 1958 to avoid US and UK obscenity laws and faded out of reach the last 30 years, The Gaudy Image is an important “lost” gay novel. Looking at the way that gay, queer and bi men and gender non-conforming working-class men lived in and around New Orleans through the lens of the Rococo prose of its passionate protagonist, ‘Tit’.

It has a curious vintage feel, in language, social intercourse and setting, like Rebel without a Cause but ‘Queer without a Hope’. It features a colourful cast of louche, some so laid back they’re virtually horizontal, others tightly wound up decadent ne’er-do-wells, but all characters who have something to love about them.

We get to know them and the places they hang out, the bars, flop houses, boarding rooms, and back rooms where they live out decadent lives, grasping at snatches of love and relationships in a word set hard against them.

The story follows Titania, queen of the fairies, aka Thomas Schwartz through the backstreets, bars and clubs as s/he moves from lover to lover, rake to fool, abuser to loser, trying to find the elusive ‘Gaudy Image’, a kind of New Orleans Great Dark Man, the perfect lover, a masculine man who ‘knows what he wants’.

Tit’s internal narrative reads heady, hot and steamy, it reminded me of By Grand Central Station I Laid Down and Wept, it’s oddly beautiful, erotic and sensual without ever being exactly sexual, it’s all epic suggestion, clearly directed towards sex between men but rarely overstepping the boundaries of the pages of the times to explicitly state so. But we understand, those of us who know how to read.

Tit knows how to read, in all senses of the word, and rarely misses an opportunity to share opinion and insight into the men who live with and around, sometimes off her/him. This is breathless prose, which speaks of steamy bayous, sub-tropical heat, suffocating intense secrets, and sweaty assignations, it’s grab it while you can, tooth and claw raw abandonment to the moment. Tit’s narrative is sultry, sweet, peachy, their voice beguiling sweet like honey, distracting from the omnipresent sharp sting of reality.

We follow their torrid adventures in love and lust, they are always funny, sometimes caustic, brutally honest, other times teasing and batting heavy eyelids with faux innocence as we slowly understand the joke, but the humour is at the heart of this book and Tit’s narrative of thriving and surviving. Tit is a shaman of their time, shape-shifting to suit the spaces.

It captures a hidden world, literally bobbing along just alongside 1950s America, a world where people see what they want to see, allowing queers to navigate the cracks and back alleys of a New Orleans happy to exploit them, just not acknowledge them.

The Gaudy Image is a sympathetic recounting of a community of queer (mostly) men, full of passion, care, insight and occasional bursts of shocking violence. It’s of it’s time, so modern notions of gender identity, queerness or femme/butch identities are somewhat removed, but at it’s core it echoes a fundamentally queer journey. The search for trust and love in a world walled by rejection, finding others like you, building a community.

The tenacity of Tit and her band of associated misfits to enjoy their lives in the face of disregard is magnificent.  It’s seedy setting uplifted by the glorious camp imaginations of Titania who can turn a dime into a diamond with a flick of her tongue.

Written by James M Smith a US writer and poet using the pseudonym William Talsman, Smith was one of the founders of modern gay literature. I was fascinated by this pre-Stonewall shard of LGBTQ+ life.

Out now: £8.99, paperback

For more info or to order the book see the publisher’s website here:

 

REVIEW: A Strange Loop @ Barbican Theatre

Posted on by Eric Page

Review by Eric Page

There’s a lot of hype around A Strange Loop, its meta’ness, its centring of black, queer, fat experiences, and its vaunted shift from Broadway to London, holding a Pulitzer and latest Tony Award-winning Best Musical. It lives up to the hype and effortlessly surpasses the publicity and cant, using originality wit and tenderness to offer up an almost unique theatrical experience wrapped in a comforting familiar style. “I’m a musical,” it whispers; “it’s alright come sit and watch us sing”, but the characters are all self-aware, they know they are in a story; they understand they are “outsiders” and speak about how they are in this fictional story, they also know, in vertiginous meta’ness, that they are all figments of the writer’s imagination.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

Meet Usher played by Kyle Ramar Freeman: a black, queer writer writing a musical about a black, queer writer writing a musical about a black, queer writer…

A Strange Loop exposes a young black artist grappling with desires, identity and instincts he both loves and loathes. Hell-bent on breaking free of his own self-perception, Usher wrestles with the thoughts in his head, brought to life on stage by a hilarious, straight-shooting ensemble.

I’d read people complain about it being too American, but we see a lot of American culture on our stages and screens and its contextualised swiftly. So glorious to see so many black queer and global majority actors giving such superb performances. With a diversity of gender and masculine presentations given ironic, deeply camp flourishes in a fantastically funny way. Camp can be so dangerous in the right hands. This is an ensemble cast who excel, in voice, movement, acting and engagement, playing the whole team of characters between them, they are given huge range to impress, and impress each and every one of them do.

We lose the fourth wall in the first few lines, we are here on stage, in the now, but also in the mind of Usher, who, as we know, is writing about writing about writing about himself. O! He contains multitudes, many mansions in his house, all haunted by voices from his psyche. They are cruel, catty, sassy and funny, always funny. The six Voices form a Greek chorus of shifting sassy shade, folding themselves in and out of the action, layering observation, opinion and some devastating throw away lines in a blizzard of caustic verbal confetti.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

My white fragility was palpable, my discomfort with the language used on stage, shocked out of my British politeness default settings (even through my bold queer lens) and feeling challenged, but seen. It’s gloriously unapologetic, it don’t care what I think, it don’t need my approval, it don’t want my regret, it’s unremorseful, and probably the most thrilling musical theatre I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s bold and tender, shocking, and unutterably sweet, I ranged between wanting to cry and welling up with anger. I was moved.

The ever-moving cast dance across the stage with some wonderful choreography from Raja Feather Kelly, there’s not a move unweighted with meaning, I’d like to watch the whole thing again just to focus on the dancers, the music is not as complex as the plot and Rona Siddiqui serves us up some pretty generic light R&B, pop musical themes but still catchy and without cynicism.

Sometimes the drum sets were too emphatic and I lost lines from the quick fire repartee on stage. Jen Schriever’s simple lighting is superb, using the depth of the Barbican staging to change geometric spaces and pull focus on intimacies, moral grandstanding and full on holy-rolling madness working in close tandem with Arnulfo Maldonado’s subtle set designs which slide in and out, offering effective evocations of theatre, apartment, home and church… The reveal of the church is a theatrical eye opener!

Photo-Marc-Brenner

And then every now and again, as a good musical must, we get moments of calm reflections, moments where the audience are shifted and the mood steps up. A chance meeting with an audience member up from Florida brings full focus onto Usher’s problem, how to write about the hard stuff in life, family, love, death and wanting to be seen for what they are. The tender emotional shifts of this musical are done with grace.

A Strange Loop deconstructs what it is to be black, holds queerness up to the light, takes men on men sex apart leaf by shinning leaf, picks at intimacies’ scabs, breaks down walls around fatness, cuts family ties with laser precision, explodes faith with microscopic forensic relentless exactness. Oh its take down/shake down of evangelical Pentecostal prejudice is done with such amazing detail, movement, voice, biblical verses, charm, it’s spot on. I’d urge any of us queers, who spent any time under the cruel yoke of faith to go watch A Strange Loop, as an act of rebuking therapy. It was joyous. It never stops being funny. The humour underpins this musical from touching to cruel and savage, we are always offered the opportunity of a laugh.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

Usher’s explorations and reasoning about the sex he’s having, or not having, are placed in the queerest contexts: a sexual health clinic, dating apps and a hook up based around status and power play. A Strange Loop looks at the pressures on gay men, the toxic internet culture, the brutal interactions on apps, the erosion of boundaries in the pursuit of sex and the conflation of physical sexual contact with intimacy. It does it with a playful frankness that both shocks and makes you giggle. Usher sings of the hurt and regret he feels after a disrespectful hook up where he is demeaned and fetishised because of his size and race. This insight into ‘boundaries’ (the title of the song) being necessary to protect himself, emotionally, professionally and sexually moves the action along.

The interactions with Usher’s family are seriously funny, a slice of American black working class life, his family seem to reflect and use the names from The Lion King (the musical that Usher is working at, many layers up in this meta narrative). Each family member is given the light and mic, his parents have stand out moments which allow us to see their own lives in perspective, there’s no charity here though. Is it happening, is it memory, is Usher puppetting his family thought their trauma? We move on never really knowing what we’re looking at, but understanding we are always in Usher’s mind.

Photo-Marc-Brenner

The raw decades of frustrations, despair and anger that pour of Usher as he confronts his father about his queerness brought a spontaneous round of applause from the audience. Addressing his mother’s refusal to accept him as queer through a full-on Gospel Horror Show of Condemnation, Censure and Biblical damnation was breath-taking, a truly jaw dropping piece of theatre, writing and staging. When the full stage is revealed it’s a real WTF moment!

See the full cast and creative team here 

His mother’s deep love for him, entwined with her unbreachable religious homophobia, is brought to a head here, with his mother’s voices asking ‘why did you write me into the show this way if you loved me?’. His devastating response is that he wrote them that way because he loves them. There are many complex scenes with his mother: the struggle and damage of love and bigotry unresolved is given a compassionate but ruthless examination, we really really hope his mother has finally understood and accepted Usher. This reminded me of Torch Song Trilogy where Arnold confronts his mother about her disregard of his grief after the death of his partner.

At its core, it’s about a clever boy trying to make sense of a world which seems to deny him dignity, visibility, or respect at every turn. It’s about his struggles to find a place to carve out a space of love, of unconditional acceptance and basic humanity and it’s a full throated, 100% queer, glass breaking high note torrent of scalding camp rage, being allowed to run, lava hot out of a brilliant sensitive mind, rebuking those of faith in their own glossolalic tongues, reaching out across visual difference of skin colour, size, intellect and wealth to connect us all.

It ends without ending, does the Strange Loop continue, or are we watching the actual ending – the show’s success, from Broadway to London, are we outside or part of the ending, happening now? This last flourish and tease with theatrical expectations is just lovely.

A Strange Loop is different, it asked us to allow our difference to define us, it demands of us to see difference as normal. If we dare. It offers us hope in the face of despair, and it’s a radical hope.

I loved it, I’m not sure I understood it completely, the textures and experiences on offer are too different from my own lived experience, its meta’ness shifts it as you watch it, it’s mercurial, it supported my development of racial stamina, making me understand queer black experiences with clarity, and I connected with it on many many levels. I left confused, thrilled, and utterly delighted to have seen it.

It also passed my ‘was it a good musical test’ where you hear the audience hum or sing the songs as they leave the auditorium, and on the way down to the Tube.

I’d recommend you go see it, seriously go see it, it’s the best new musical I’ve seen in years!

A Strange Loop is at the Barbican until September 9. For more info or to book tickets follow this link to the Barbican Theatre website

Meet the Author: Redfern Jon Barrett @ the Ledward Centre tonight

Posted on by Eric Page

This month’s ‘Meet the Author’ event, a free evening of sparkling wit and laid back conversation with Scene book reviewer Eric Page, is at the Ledward Centre this evening at 7pm. ( doors 6:30)

Meet the Author events see Eric pop an author on the sofa and chat about writing, books, queerness and inspiration. This month is the turn of deliciously decadent Redfern Jon Barrett whose book Proud Pink Sky breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia – presenting a vision of the world’s first gay state.

A glittering metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of Pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, Proud Pink Sky questions how much we must sacrifice to find identity and community.

You can read the Scene review of Proud Pink Sky here

Redfern’s essays and short stories have appeared in publications including The Sun, Guernica, Strange Horizons, Passages North, PinkNews, Booth, FFO, ParSec, Orca, and Nature Futures. Born in Sheffield in 1984, Redfern grew up in market towns, seaside resorts, and post-industrial cities before moving to Wales to study at Swansea University (Prifysgol Abertawe). Redfern is non-binary queer and they have campaigned for LGBTQ+ and polyamory rights since they were a teenager. They currently live in Berlin.

Join Eric in the comfortable surroundings of the Ledward Centre for an entertaining evening of gentle probing and hear the author read from their book. There will be opportunities for questions, and you can even get your copy signed!

This event is free but ticked. Book your FREE ticket via this link

 

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Proud Pink Sky’ by Redfern Jon Barrett

Posted on by Eric Page

Review: Eric Page

Proud Pink Sky breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia – presenting a vision of the world’s first gay state. A glittering metropolis of 24 million people, this MegaCity of Berlin is a bustling world of Pride parades, polyamorous trysts, with an official gay language, Polari. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenagers William and Gareth, but is there a place for them in the deeply divided city? Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering high rises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district – not until she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.

Meet the Author event: Redfern Jon Barrett @ the Ledward Centre this Thursday, July 20, free event, learn more and get tickets here: 

Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, Proud Pink Sky questions how much we must sacrifice to find identity and community.

The story follows the journey to Berlin of these two couples, one hetro one gay/queer and their various reasons for making the move, through choice, or urgent necessity. We don’t learn too much about the contemporary history/political situations of their world, although we spend some time in a deeply puritanical England and the gay enclave of Brighton – politically affiliated to and sheltered by the power of the Republic of Berlin. As the story progresses, it backfills important events and dates to give a more rounded idea of the context of the Republic of Berlin, it’s believable and captures the idea that history is a flow, and will find a way to produce the same effects no matter the course it follows.

We learn about day to day living in the Republic from the experiences of the main two protagonists, and their partners, friends and acquaintances.  Through chance meetings a close net of relationships develop based on usual human needs; friendship, company, finding a family and a safe place, along with the need for adventure! As the characters settle into their new home, this apparently glittering queer paradise – we quickly learn – is not quite as perfect as it seems, although it’s viewed (and promoted) as a haven for LGBTQ+ people across the world.

“It asks us what it is to be a real ally, it asks us to look beyond our comfortable privilege…”

By using both a young male gay couple and a heterosexual family the author allows us to understand the experience of a wide range of different identities as both couples learn more about the real diversity and vibrant complexity of the world they are living in. As they explore, literally and emotionally the spaces they now inhabit, being exposed to new ideas, and ways of being they begin to understand the truth of their own lives and how that will affect them living in the gay republic.

The political settlement of the Republic is unanimously gay and lesbian, not LGBTQ. Gender diversity is considered a threat to the integrity of the Republic, with trans and binary people driven to live in a permanently overshadowed walled ghetto, bisexuality is barley tolerated and trans and heterophobia opening practiced. There’s an ugliness under the buff exfoliated skin of the glittering towers of this Rainbow Metropolis.

Barrett’s prose is engaging, and they fold a good action based narrative thumping in and around the personal relationships of these people. The move to the huge megalopolis changes who they are, what they are and the way they relate to each other.  We see how the political unrest, the prejudice and privilege of the ruling lesbian and gay classes plays out on the trans, hetero, and gender queer minorities who work the bars, construction and menial jobs that keep the city running.

Redfern Jon Barrett

There’s some funny set scenes woven in which made me smile, the geography of the city a camp nod to current LGBTQ+ tribal designations,  the idea of a noble ( but not perfect) Gay Republic is glorious and Barrett sets this up well, giving heroic history to the development of this megacity space. The exploration and horrible denouement of the book, but not of the Republic, gives us both insight into the ways that fear and radicalization eats away at good people, and also offers hope in the transformation of ignorance into understanding.

This sub plot also ramps up the narrative tension, in a harsh staccato way. Without too many spoilers, our main protagonists undergo an emotional transformation allowing them to reach the beginning of authentic living. Barrett offers us no happy endings, but there is a resolve; untidy, uncomfortable, and ugly in parts, it is also intensely human in its choices. The book brings this point back to the centre of the narrative time and time again and echoes and explores our own worlds contemporary problems with extending real inclusion to our gender diverse communities in an equitable and fair way.

“Proud Pink Sky reminds us that hope will never be silent.”

Proud Pink Sky is an entertaining and engaging queer alt’ history novel based in a believable futuristic gay and lesbian republic; a glittery brave new world; a MegacitySlay suggestive of a queer cross between Blade Runner and Logans Run; a fabulous multi-layered, dense city of the future run by a conservative, binary power structure, oozing privilege, fighting change. Its own traumatic early history, playing out again in the trauma visited on ‘others’.  The established ruling elite is brittle with vested interest and pumps out populist propaganda to keep its population angry, and focused on the sedition of a marginalised minority, teetering on Orwellian tyranny to keep the status quo. Now what does that remind me of?

Barrett’s deeply human story of lives, loves, tragedy and hope touches us all in its universality, but it is a clarion call for unconditional acceptable and a warning against how thin a gruel tolerance is for nourishing people with no rights. It asks us what it is to be a real ally, it asks us to look beyond our comfortable privilege, it urges us to hold out our hands to our LGBTQ+ siblings and feel the commonality, and fight for equality for all. Proud Pink Sky reminds us that hope will never be silent.

Polari is one of the official languages of this gloriously imagined Berlin, and one of the curious aspects of the book is, as the story develops, the characters learn and use more and more Polari in their everyday speech, allowing the reader to absorb and learn this historical queer lingo alongside. The book left me with a pretty good understanding of Polari which was an unexpected treat and has a comprehensive appendix of this historical LGBTQ+ lingo at the end. Bona!

Out now, paperback. For more info or to order the book see the publisher’s website here:

BOOK REVIEW: QUEER LIFE, QUEER LOVE. VOLUME 2 Matt Bates

Posted on by Eric Page

QUEER LIFE, QUEER LOVE.

VOLUME 2

Matt Bates

Review by Eric Page

This second installment of selected writing chosen by editors from Muswell Press is a uber Queer celebration of the best writing from the global margins. 44 poems, essays, stories and short fiction,  bundled up into this anthology offering unique perspectives of our world through the Queer lens. As in the volume 1, there is a focus on both established writers and an effort to bring new writers front and centre by showcasing their work and differing narrative forms.

These stories hold the beat of Queerness strong; it pounds through the plots, prose and ideas shared between these pages, holding up to the light, pressing close in the shadows, highlighting in ultra neon, throwing the most fabulous shade, the intersectional voices of the authors are seriously diverse. The fascinating, the forbidden, the subversive, and even the mundane, but all works that express the view from outside, but folding that back inside to share our views, our space, our authentic lives.

From the deeply serious to the rather funny, from epic leaps of the imagination to the gritty clarity of autobiographical extracts, all Queer life is here offered up to the discerning reader with a blunt, brutal, and beguiling authenticity which engages from the first page. Pick it up and drop open randomly and dive into the thrilling stories, or methodically work your way from front to back, or back to front, of course, if you’re non-rectoverso reader.

I enjoy the opportunity to explore new writers and a broad anthology is an easy way to do this, the team at Muswell Press have excelled at bringing together a real range of voices here, diverse, inclusive, engaging and challenging. It also included a few writers who frankly didn’t engage with me at all, but that’s the glory of a wide collection, you can just skip the ones you don’t like.  I don’t want my books to lead me into familiar pastures, I want them to take me off into the unknown, the different, the wild, the possible. Queer Life, Queer Love does just that, with passion, verve, and a thrilling disregard for convention.

Out now £9.99

For more info or to buy the book see the publisher’s website here:

 

BOOK REVIEW: Broken Hearts & Zombie Parts by William Hussey

Posted on by Eric Page

Broken Hearts & Zombie Parts

William Hussey

Review by Eric Page 

How do you cure a broken heart? In this Gay Rom-Zom-Com we follow our protagonist  Jesse Spark, a huge movie geek,  who sports a literal broken heart and in weeks will require major surgery to repair it. In this time he’s set himself the task of finding a boyfriend  and grabbing a summer romance, one he thinks may be his first and only opportunity for love, meaning  he has a month to accomplish these two tasks.

The book shadows his increasingly daft attempts to shoot his epic zombie movie on a shoestring budget knowing it’s his only hope of getting into film school. And also fall in love – this is hugely important to him because he’s insecure, frightened and suffering from some real body image problems, and knows that his life saving surgery is going to land him with a huge scar. The book deals with his wrestling with this negative body image, his queerness, his need for company because how will anyone ever fancy him after his surgery?

The book is a gentle mix of sex education meets love with fake zombies – in this deliciously funny gay young adult romance, the author examines themes around body image, self-acceptance and falling in love, all tucked into Jesse’s film – Zomhom- a low-budget zombie flick. Two friends Casper and Morgan help Jesse in both his quest and dealing with some of the life-threatening medical interventions that are detailed in this book, and it’s of merit to the author that such frank clarity is given to both the hospital settings and the medical interventions and Jesses feelings, fear and own bravery is explored in such tender detail, along with the support of his friends.  The surgery allows some seriously deep themes to be explored, not just self-image post-surgery, but death or survival if there is no post to the surgery! Author Hussey writes from personal experience of heart surgery and this allows an authenticity of experience to really underscore these chapters and conversations.

The book makes no secret of its narrative destination, and Casper’s hot, gay cousin is soon involved in the film and is the main romance lead here, so it’s a fairly safe ride but packed with humour and although the happyish ending suited the book; Jesses’ coming out is fine, but the author looks at how other people may be impacted by people living authentically, the ending left me feeling slightly detached from characters I’d been caring about a few chapters earlier. However, this could be your reviewers’ hard heart reasserting  itself as the book is intentionally sugary sweet.

Award winning author Hussey’s writing is infused with real LGBTQ+ stories that younger folx can relate to. Great fun, heart-warming happy every afterish storytelling for fans of young Queer romance.

Out now £8.99

For more info or to buy the book see the publishers website here: 

 

 

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