Gay festival makes its points personal

Gay marriage might be hot on the news agenda, but this year's International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival emphasised the subtle, human elements of its dramatic selection, writes PETER CRAWLEY

NOW IN ITS ninth year, and having survived an organisational split that led, in a bizarre stand-off, to two rival festivals in 2010, the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival returns with a slightly slimmer programme than usual.

This may reflect the economic pinch, but it also focuses the energy of a festival whose agenda – to present theatre that features either gay participation or themes relevant to gay people – is so inclusive it can be hard to imagine anything ineligible.

Moreover, it occurs at a point when gay rights are again prominent on the news agenda, as US president Barack Obama leant his support to gay marriage while his presumptive rival Mitt Romney did not.

It would be unfair to suggest, from a small sampling of 20 Irish and international productions, that the festival missed a chance to spotlight that issue, but where some productions this year seem salient to the urgency of contemporary gay representation, others seem politically disinterested and some simply behind the times.

Elegies for Angels, Punks & Raging Queens, for instance, a song cycle about the Aids epidemic that was first performed in 1989 and was here produced by Limerick’s Bottom Dog Theatre Company, addresses the disease as though it was a new phenomenon; confusing, unfair and all but untreatable. Through spoken-word poems and musical numbers it exhaustively outlines the many, many ways HIV might be contracted (unprotected sex, accidental needle jabs, shared needles, blood transfusion and, reviving one urban legend, malevolent people keen to spread the disease). If it didn’t feel like an after-school special with every song arriving in the key of Broadway lachrymose, director Myles Breen might have been able to give it a sense of place and to render it as a moving message or a sobering reminder freed from a time capsule.

“Obviously he didn’t know whether to call me a bitch or a bastard,” reports Rachael Jones, the transgendered proprietor of a small cafe on America’s Bible Belt, which she opts to call “inclusive” rather than LGBT. A monologue written from interviews with its real-life subject, Rachael’s Café, Lucy Danser’s play for Little Fly Theatre, is certainly infused with the politics of identity, tolerance and acceptance, yet the softly sympathetic delivery of even that line, from Graham Elwell, reinforces the appearance of a performance vehicle. As Rachael describes her transition from family man and printer-ink salesman Eric, to the home-cooking enthusiast Rachael, Danser moves assuredly through a narrative of honesty, emotional betrayal and acceptance. As she addresses us, however, Rachael is typically seeking to avoid confrontation, removing her dress and donning a shirt for a parent/ teacher meeting. Danser’s project is too gentle-hearted to emphasise that quiet tragedy of retreat, but she subtly imparts the point that for transgendered equality there’s still a long way to go.

If Hazel Cullen’s supple and brisk drama Half a Person, for Penny Productions, seems more secure in itself, it may be because sexual identity is not its subject, but its context. Rosie (Joanne Quinn) and Sarah (Aine Ní Laoghaire) have a relationship whose only pressure comes from within, brought about by Sarah’s unspecified psychological disorder: she wets the bed, something the performer Aoife Moore, playing a range of previous partners in Sarah’s life, facilitates by periodically throwing a glass of water over Ní Laoghaire.

As director, Cullen works with the three excellent performers to outline a strained relationship history with a necessary lightness of touch, letting Ní Laoghaire summon the suggestive folds of psychological disarray through sinuous physical performance, while Moore, clearly delineating between several characters, suggests a life shaped by several people, rather than sexual orientation and medical conditions.

The piece ends on such a contentedly low key, upbeat note that it seems abrupt, yet such understated gestures make Half a Person seem more fully realised.

Such gently won security isn’t something shared by the characters in Oskar Brown’s Between, an ambitious two-hander from South Africa, which hops between time lines to unravel the romantic history of its protagonist, an acting instructor coaching a student through the delivery, pointedly, of Shakespeare’s sonnet, “As an unperfect actor on the stage.”

The sexual coming-of-age story is nothing new, but Brown, who also performs, maintains a compelling ambiguity, as Nicholas Campbell slips between the role of his student and the childhood friend who awakened his sexuality.

Like Juliet Jenkin’s Mary The Conqueror – which is an intelligently crafted if heavy-handed paralleling of the novelist Mary Renault and her subject Alexander the Great, meeting each other on the shores of eternity – or Elwell’s transition from Rachael to Eric, or Aoife Moore’s continual reassembling of the building blocks of character, Brown’s show understood sexuality as a sustained performance. It is a complex interaction between persona truth and public display that makes everyone – lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered, or straight, inclusive – an “unperfect” actor. Such narratives may not be headline news, but they have a political amperage of their own, sketching personal histories behind a broader social evolution, seizing details from a bigger picture.