Clockwise from top left: Penny Arcade – Longing Lasts Longer; E15; Transformer; Dandy Darkly’s Trigger Happy!; K’Rd Strip – A Place to Stand; Tales from a Cabaret
As any regular readers out there will know, I’m fascinated by the ways in which our society’s politics is written into its places, especially its urban spaces – in particular how commercial forces connected to runaway property prices and widening inequality result in the proliferation of certain types of built environment, such as luxury flats and chain retail outlets, and the dwindling off of others, such as social housing and independent cultural and community (and indeed commercial) spaces. And at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, there were plenty of shows engaging with these subjects in ways ranging from the fantastical to the militant.
I was terribly tickled by one of the tales in Dandy Darkly’s Trigger Happy!, the latest collection of queerly supernatural satirical stories from the prodigiously loquacious Southern drag clown. In a yarn called American Apparel – a kind of debauched take on Ratatouille – Darkly paints a characteristically grotesque and cinematically vivid scene focused on Bidet, a rat with a penchant for drag. Bidet is a floor-level habitué of a storied queer hang-out known as the Imperial Poppycock Saloon – a venue whose century-spanning history is no defence against marauding zombie shopgirls or circling corporate buzzards. “They arrive, seemingly overnight…” It’s a bittersweet, politically nuanced tale, cherishing continuity and heritage while acknowledging that “the hardest lesson to learn from real death is that real life goes on”. When Dandy performed it en route to Edinburgh at Bar Wotever in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, I’m told the crowd went wild. Deservedly so.
Another fable-like take on such situations came from the Creative Martyrs, who must by now be bored of me describing them as a cross between Laurel and Hardy and Vladimir and Estragon but it’ll have to do till I think of something better. Tales from a Cabaret is a show echoing with Weimar whispers that the Martyrs first brought to Edinburgh in 2010. Since then (as I suggested in my review for the Scotsman) it has only grown more relevant. A suite of songs for voice, cello, ukulele and kazoo brings to life the story of a cabaret scene in an unnamed city, its stars – a dancer and an escapologist – and the stealthy way in which society changes around them. It’s a show about the death of variety in both senses: as creeping, thuggish conservativism takes hold of the place, satire is choked off, performers face increasing restrictions and venues start to close their doors. The Martyrs are as unprepossessing as Dandy Darkly is unignorable but both weave their audiences into spider-webs of creative tension undergirded by political passion. As the Martyrs put it, “the heart is a revolutionary cell”.
The Fringe also offered dynamically creative accounts of real-life places. In K’Rd Strip: A Place to Stand, Kiwi troupe Okareka Dance Company gave us a highly expressionistic tour of Karangahape Road, the Auckland red-light district where queers, sex workers and all kinds of other outsiders have historically found a foothold, and which is now undergoing gentrification. The bold fusion of Maori dance, song, storytelling, drag and comedy seems to stake this piece out as an effervescent romp but (as noted in my Scotsman review) it becomes something much darker. In terms of politics and place, it’s a hugely rich and ambitious undertaking – one that celebrates a zone of more or less lost souls without whitewashing some of the things such a zone can witness, or even facilitate. The six performers regularly impersonate birds with hilarious results but the sense of observing fauna has a deeper resonance: as in nature, the stakes are sometimes simply survival.
Another fabulated take on a real-life scene could be found in Transformer, in which Jonny Woo takes on the persona of Lou Reed to lead a proper rock band in a full performance of Reed’s seminal solo album of the same name. It’s quite a departure for Woo, whom we’re more used to seeing as ringmaster of east London’s alt drag scene and purveyor of his own brand of queer perf art. This is a canny choice for a Fringe show, though, with Reed’s star appeal and the album’s iconic tracks (Walk on the Wild Side, Perfect Day, Satellite of Love) offering an easy in for those who don’t know Woo. But it’s no rote tribute act. The show delivers in spades as a hard-rocking gig with tight arrangements, walloping backing vocals and a flirtatious, feral frontman in the form of Woo’s Reed, all black leather, animal grace and gravelly tones (and somewhat wandering accent).
It’s a production that envelops the audience as performers urge us onto our feet and rove amongst – or on top of – us. (I got an up-close-and-personal view of Pretty Miss Cairo, in the guise of Candy Darling, of the kind normally reserved for partners or proctologists.) But the show also serves as a primer in the world of the album’s creation: the scene around Max’s Kansas City, the New York bar that acted as the downtown scene’s salon-cum-backroom at the height of the Factory era. So we get a potted history of that scene’s rise and fall – the people, the politics, the phone-booth sex, the arrival of smack – in which Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas line up alongside the woozy vocals and the driving bass. No encroaching corporatisation here – just good, old-fashioned burn-out – but in today’s context, the fact of telling the story counts as an act of remembrance, perhaps resistance.
New York’s downtown scene, from Max’s Kansas City right on up to Pussy Faggot, is of course the home turf of Penny Arcade, unstinting firebrand and keeper of the flame of radical inquiry and fearless self-determination that has animated alternative culture since the 60s. In her latest full-length show, Penny Arcade: Longing Lasts Longer, which premiered at the Fringe, Arcade argues that that culture is dying, and she uses her beloved NYC as a case study. The Big Apple, she says, has become the Big Cupcake. Where once the curious young embraced transgression, risk and self-exploration, now they prioritise saccharine consumerist gratification, and they expect the city to deliver it. “They don’t want to reinvent themselves. They want to reinvent New York.” It’s a relentlessly propulsive, witty and intellectually invigorating show, Arcade’s charismatic and blazingly impassioned delivery underpinned by an emotive rolling soundtrack of terrific rock and pop coordinated by her longtime co-creator Steve Zehentner.
As I suggested in this Guardian interview with Arcade ahead of the Fringe, it’s no nostalgia trip: the argument isn’t about the fact that things change but how this new wave of “hypergentrification” functions as a specific kind of change that erases both history and the possibility of difference, let alone dissidence. In terms of its argument, the show meanders somewhat before lighting on a heartfelt paean to the redemptive power of self-individuation, as opposed to the cold consolations of status and conformity. You’ll struggle to find a finer critique of the language of the integrated spectacle – but by rejecting that language, I wonder whether Longing Lasts Longer puts itself beyond the reach of those who would most benefit from it – those of whatever age who are submerged in the spectacle and more receptive to narrative and instruction than argument and challenge. Well, perhaps Arcade is more interested in testifying than converting. In any case, it’s a vital and rousing piece that will be invaluable as an instrument of articulation and galvanisation to those who know or suspect that “the hypnotic swirl of media and market” ain’t really where it’s at.
Arcade’s is a show explicitly rooted in real experience of real places. So, in its different way, is E15, a terrific piece of verbatim theatre from FYSA Theatre developed in collaboration with its primary subjects, the Focus E15 Mothers. The E15 mums found themselves at the sharp end of London “regeneration” in 2013, when Newham council turfed them out of the hostel for vulnerable young people where they were living so the site could be redeveloped. They faced an impossible choice between unaffordable London rents and relocation elsewhere, far from family and friends. As the show deftly relates, a basic sense of injustice evolved into a coordinated campaign of resistance, with tactics ranging from occupation of luxury show flats to the delivery of a 10,000-name petition to City Hall on a double-decker bus. Touching on other comparable recent cases such as Sweets Way and the Aylesbury estate, the play documents the emergence of group political consciousness, the recognition that what affects one affects all, and the understanding that campaigning breeds confidence. This is reflected in a boisterous production involving banners, music, bunting and surprise interventions. It’s not blind to the inevitably limited scope of such campaigns in countering deprivation and despair. But it’s committed to the idea that if we are to defend a public realm that is responsive to factors other than power and money, we have to “educate, agitate, organise”.
