Blue Wizard

Blue Wizard runs at Belvoir from 19 February – 15 March 2015. By Nick Coyle.

I first saw and wrote about Nick Coyle’s Blue Wizard at PACT in 2013, when it was part of the Tiny Stadiums festival. My friend Hannah and I was utterly entranced by it. We were thrilled when we heard it was coming back to play at Belvoir, and we took the opportunity to drag a whole bunch of friends along with us this time so that they too could understand its fabulousness.

Blue Wizard is such a special piece of theatre. It’s ridiculous and sublime and silly and touching and spectacular all by turns. The Blue Wizard (Coyle) has come to earth on a special mission from his home – a crystal planet where everyone’s gay – but when his dance of erotic greeting isn’t exactly received the way he’d hoped and he realises that he can’t contact home (in particular, he can’t contact his beloved boyfriend, John Quark Jon), things take a darker turn. Alone except for a truly creepy wizard baby that he christens Meryl Streep, the Blue Wizard must work out how to survive in an unfriendly and lonely world.

The story of a fabulously sparkly gay wizard isolated in a world that does not welcome him is not a particularly subtle allegory, but there’s no reason for it to be. What I remember most from the last time I saw this show is how funny it was, but what struck me this time was just how sad it was as well. That’s something that’s clearly been built on in development, because the underlying level of pathos in this version of Blue Wizard is much more poignant. The Blue Wizard is fabulous and funny, but he’s also horribly lonely. He tries to do the best he can and to parent Meryl Streep insofar as he is capable (parenting is not something that Blue Wizards – the wizards of flirting, fucking and dancing – are usually that good at), but he misses his home, and he misses his life, and he misses his boyfriend, and he misses belonging.

It’s a really wonderful piece of queer theatre and it’s perfect for Mardi Gras. I’m so, so glad I got to see it again, and that I could make more people experience it too. It also clearly contains the best use of Britney Spears’ song Perfume in the history of theatre, ever. It has a truly startling and moving ending (which is still a shock even when you know it’s coming), and the end sequence with the treadmill is hair-standing-up-ingly spectacular. I was worried that it wouldn’t be as magical the second time around, but I was wrong – the Blue Wizard’s spell is even more powerful this time.

(Also, I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to know more about the Pink Wizards of Love and Passive Aggression. I would watch a show that was just about them doing day to day tasks and living their crystal planet lives.)

Privates on Parade

Privates on Parade runs at the New Theatre from February 15 – March 8. By Peter Nichols, music by Denis King, directed by Alice Livingstone.

It’s really hard to know what to say about Privates on Parade. It is a mess. A glorious mess – an officers’ mess – but a mess nonetheless.

Mess isn’t necessarily a bad thing (in fact, there are scholars who have devoted lots of time and space and energy to thinking through the poetics and erotics of mess). But mess has to be carefully contained, otherwise you end up with the literary/textual/theatrical equivalent of one of those houses you see on Hoarders. That’s kind of what I felt happened with Privates on Parade. There is just way too much going on in it. All this stuff has been thrown into a big heap and jumbled around and then strewn chaotically across almost three hours, and… and it’s a mess. It’s difficult and confusing and occasionally rewarding, but mostly, it’s just cluttered. And that is a problem, because all that junk is hiding the bits in this show that are genuinely fabulous.

Privates on Parade is set amongst a group of British soldiers stationed in Singapore in 1948. If I was going to try and describe the plot, it would a) be confusing, and b) probably be spoilers, so I won’t. Suffice it to say that it follows a group of British soldiers in an environment they don’t really understand, coping the best they can. At the beginning of the play, Private Steven Flowers (David Hooley) is introduced to the group, and quickly realises that there are two distinct groups: one, spearheaded by the nefarious Sergeant Major Reg Drummond (Matt Butcher), and the other, a group devoted to entertaining. These include drag queen Acting Captain Terri Dennis (James Lee), and gay couple Corporal Len Bonny (Martin Searles) and Lance Corporal Charles Bishop (Jamie Collette). The avowedly straight Steven also has to negotiate his growing relationship with half-Welsh, half-Indian dancing girl Sylvia Morgan (Diana Perini). Ideas of sexuality, race, and class are mobilised and explored.

If that summary was confusing, don’t worry – I was confused too. It was hard to tell whether Privates on Parade had too much or too little plot. There was so much going on it was genuinely hard to keep track of, and yet the actual linear thread of the story seems to be quite insubstantial. It’s almost like there are too many genres cobbled together here: there’s vaudeville and pantomime and dance and all kinds of things going on, as well as scenes between characters that might be interesting in terms of elucidating character but didn’t really go anywhere. Some of it enhances the story, but some of it obscures it.

I feel like this was an actor’s play – there was a lot in here for the performers to sink their teeth into, and they clearly relished this, because there were some fabulous performances. Diana Perini as Sylvia was particularly outstanding, but there were no weak links across the board. However, I’m not quite sure if it’s an audience’s play. It seems strange to say this about a play from the 1970s which won the Olivier award for best new comedy, but it feels like it’s one or two good workshops away from being ready for the stage. It needs taming. It needs a firm hand to turn its messiness into delicious complexity. The direction here goes some way to achieving that – I think Alice Livingstone has done a fine job – but it’s the kind of thing that probably needs to start from the ground up.

Privates on Parade is a lot of fun. There are great performances, and a lot of the songs are genuinely toe-tapping. But there is just way, way too much going on in this piece. It’s fun, but it’s messy.

milkmilklemonade

Milkmilklemonade runs at the New Theatre from February 5-March 2. By Josh Conkel, directed by Melita Rowston.

Milkmilklemonade is at once fantastical and realistic, funny and moving. It is a show with its own language, one that is quite difficult to acclimate to at first. It is a theatrical language, a melodramatic language, a performative language, one which exposes the problem at the heart of the play: how to be yourself when people are telling you that you should be someone else.

Our hero is Emory (Mark Dessaix), a fifth grade boy who lives on a chicken farm with his dying stuck-in-her-ways grandmother (Pete Nettrell). Emory likes dolls and singing and dancing, dreaming of entering a major pageant-style competition with his Barbie Starlene (Leah Donovan, who also plays several other roles) and his best friend, talking chicken Linda (Sarah Easterman). His grandmother, on the other hand, thinks he should do more stereotypically male things. The other key figure in Emory's life is Elliot (Kieran Foster), sometimes a bully, sometimes a friend, a boy who, despite his aggressive insistence on his own masculinity, loves playing house with Emory and fantasises about going to the prom.

In her groundbreaking work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler talks about the problems of gender and performativity. I won't quote her, because her prose is some of the most dense and impenetrable I have ever encountered, but essentially, she argues that gender is not innate but is performed, forcing people into rigid roles that might not necessarily suit them. We see a classic case of this in milkmilklemonade. Unable to adequately perform the masculine role that his grandmother wants him to, Emory escapes into a fantasy world where he can perform the way he wants to. Sometimes he is co-opted into Elliot's dreamworld, queering the domestic fantasy, exposing more problems with gender performance. According to his grandmother, it is his duty to become a stereotypical man. This is horrifying to him, particularly when read alongside the inexorable destiny of the chickens on his farm, which is to die horribly in a monstrous machine. Emory must find a way to perform like he wants to – to create his own theatrical language for interpreting the world –or his identity, his self, will perish.

Milkmilklemonade could have been a big mess. There's always a danger of taking it too far with this kind of wacky, surrealist humour, of letting the absurdity take over the show like an avalanche. While I suspect the show might still be a bit much for some audience members, Melita Rowston has showed remarkable restraint in her deft direction of this piece. By keeping it carefully controlled, Rowston has allowed the wackiness of it to be funny and absorbing without losing sight of the real melancholy at its heart.

While I was a little apprehensive in the early stages, I ended up really enjoying milkmilklemonade(though I was never quite clear on where the title came from). It's at once completely absurd and a thoughtful commentary on the problems of performing identity. It features some great performances and some really clever direction. Definitely the best play I've seen starring a giant chicken!