Girl meets girl

OF LATE, contemporary culture seems to have more TVs than a Holiday Inn. Transvestism is in. From The Crying Game to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and from Ed Wood to Braveheart, it seems that a man without a dress simply cannot go to the ball. And Irish theatre has not been behind hand in the gender bending business either. The Abbey's recent productions of Angels in America and The Hostage have featured spectacular cross dressers. Druid currently is a due to present Simone Benmussa's Alfred Nobbs, based on George Moore's tale of a woman who passes as a man, in rehearsal. And Emma Donoghue's second play, Ladies and Gentlemen, about the 19th century male impersonator Annie Hindle is currently at the Project.

In television and the cinema, cross dressing can be wildly subversive. The dizzying comedy of Some Like It Hot or of Dame Edna Everage exploits the unhinging effect of sexual double take in media that generally present their illusions as real. In the theatre, though, there is a problem. Transvestism is so deeply embedded in theatre history as to be almost a commonplace. When it comes to gender bending, there is nothing new under the theatrical sun.

Theatre, of its very nature, is always challenging sexual identities. At its heart is the notion that the roles we play including the roles of man and woman are not given to us by nature but made up as we go along. It never occurred to the Greeks, for example, that female roles should be played by women. All you needed was a different mask.

And this notion has never really been off stage. In Twelfth Night, for instance, Elizabethan audiences could watch a boy playing a girl pretending to be a boy a much more dizzying confusion of genders than anything on offer in the 1990s. In the 18th century, Peg Woffington played a male role Farquhar's Sir Harry Wildair on and off for 17 years, and Dora Jordan was a famously "pretty boy". Sarah Bernhardt and Siobhan McKenna played Hamlet. Rosaleen Linehan was an excellent Feste in the Gate a few years ago. More recently, Fiona Shaw has revived the tradition. And, of course, the pantomime dame, far from being shocking, is one of the cosiest figures imaginable.

So how, in representing transvestism on stage, do you stop a subversive challenge to fixed sexual identities from becoming just a replay of an established theatrical convention? How do you avoid merely making literal and explicit what is all the more fun for being ambiguous and unstated? Emma Donoghue's play makes this question all the more immediate by taking the theatre itself as its world.

It is set almost entirely in the dressing room of a New York vaudeville theatre where Annie Hindle is making a comeback after the death of her "wife", a young Irish immigrant, Annie Ryan (Cathy Belton). All five characters are members of a music hall troupe a male drag artist (James Barry), the company manager (David Heap) and Annie's former lover turned competitor (Sian Quill). They weave themselves between Annie's memories and her present desolation.

This explicit theatricality promises some kind of reflection on sexual identity as a performance, and in some respects that promise is fulfilled in David Byrne's production. Noelle Brown's remarkable performance as Annie does play on the whole idea of impersonation. She acts out gender, not as a fixed fate, but as a series of gestures that can be learned and perfected, deployed or discarded. And the clever, lightly ironic music hall songs, written for the play by Donoghue and Carole Nelson and sung with real vaudeville panache, begin to make that playfulness inhabit the stage.

THE problem, though, is that this inventiveness remains at the mercy of a narrative that is at once too laborious and too thin. Throughout the telling, you always feel that Annie is found as a finished piece of history, not invented from moment to moment as a theatrical persona must be. And you also feel that simply because the central relationships are homosexual, there is no felt need to actually explore either sex itself or the nature of human relationships.

As social history, a recovery of lost lesbian lives, the story is fascinating. But as theatre, its sexual confusions, compared to what you might find in Shakespeare are actually rather tame. Though told with a good deal of narrative sophistication, the story is in fact rather touchingly old fashioned girl meets girl, girl loves girl, girl loses girl. If you take away the twist that the lovers are of the same sex, the plot would not be out of place in a 1930s biopic. What is, as history, new and revealing, remains, without a much more radical exploration of performance it self rather old hat as theatre.

There is, in the end, a sense in this play as there was in Emma Donoghue's previous play for Glasshouse, I Know My Own Heart, of a writer of great skill, wit and intelligence whose style is cramped by a dutiful desire to tell other people's stories. Theatre really works when playwrights tell, at however many removes, their own stories. If those stories are about sexual identity, then theatre offers wilder, more wicked ways of telling them than are explored here.