Clockwise from top left: Diane Chorley; Trans Scripts; This Much; Ecce Homo; The LipSinkers; Sweet Dreams
Last June, Time magazine put Laverne Cox on its cover and declared the “transgender tipping point” had arrived. A year on, the Edinburgh Fringe seems to have reached its own tipping point in terms of trans visibility. As I suggested in a preview feature for the Guardian ahead of the festival, there was an unprecedented range of shows this year dealing with trans subjects of various kinds, from Jo Clifford’s nourishing Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven to a revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
And trans character comedian Sarah Franken – who was known until recently as Will Franken – presented her first set as a woman. As she told the Independent, “I come out cold and say, ‘Hello, I’m Sarah and I’m going to do some character comedy for you tonight. And this is not a character by the way… It’s the first time I’ve ever come on not in character.’”
This idea of being in character or not in character seems worth unpacking a bit. For it seemed to me that it wasn’t just about trans experience at this year’s Fringe: there was a wider appetite for shows engaged with many other kinds of gender variance. As Franken suggests, a trans comic presenting as their identified gender is not “in character”; but a performer playing someone else of a different gender – or indeed a drag performer – is.
For some Fringe shows, switching gender was a gambit in the service of some strategic aim, either within the text or beyond it. In comedy, for instance, Zoe Coombs Marr: Dave saw Marr take on the guise of an archetypal male comic to engage with the gender politics of the stand-up circuit. Another show, Man to Man, was about a German woman who poses as her husband from the 1930s to the 1980s out of concern for her safety. And another show, Prey, was billed as “the story of how a successful businessman cross-dressed to change the way his staff saw him, and ended up totally changing the way he sees the world”.
I didn’t see these shows so can’t comment on their execution but they seem to speak to a desire on the part of artists – and audiences, given that at least a couple of them did well – to play with gender as part of an expressive and analytical tool kit, to embrace its constructedness as a way of exploring the arbitrary or fluid elements of everyone’s identity.
Other productions zeroed in sartorial transgression as a device for opening up social and political subjects. This Much (or an Act of Violence Towards the Institution of Marriage) was a shrewd and engaging three-hander about the advent of same-sex marriage, its pressures and its discontents (see my Scotsman review here). The main character struggles to balance normative pressure to settle down into married domesticity with a sense of resistance to the limitations of the institution. And so, in an attempt to queer his own wedding, he dons a bridal gown ahead of the reception. Later, again trying to resist the norm, he wears the same gown to a funeral. “I want to destroy the niceness of this,” he says. He continues with an unattributed quotation from Bette Bourne, originally talking of life in 1970s drag communes: “I didn’t put on the dress to become a woman. I put on the dress to become a new kind of man.”
A more naïve example can be found in Le Gateau Chocolat: Black, the cabaret performer’s memoir show about his experiences with depression (see my Scotsman review here). In a telling anecdote from his Nigerian childhood, Gateau describes going to the beach as a young boy, wearing his sister’s bikini and feeling ever so glam doing it. He was told off by a lifeguard and forbidden from returning in such an outfit. The lifeguard, he felt, spoke not just for himself but with “the voice of everyone”. The bikini was worn out of joy, not the discontent motivating the gown at the funeral, but it had the same destabilising effect.
Gendered expectations around clothing were also at the heart of Feral Foxy Ladies’ I Got Dressed in Front of My Nephew Today, an engaging and though-provoking piece about the toil underpinning the conventional beauty ethos (see my Scotsman review here). If men are conventionally forbidden from partaking in glamour, women are conventionally forbidden from neglecting it. This show writes out the time, money and neurosis involved in the pursuit of the straight drag that a ‘beautiful’ woman must perform every day – “the lengths to which I travel to become magnificent”.
Other shows come at these issues of gender, clothing and identity more glancingly – a hiding-in-plain-sight, don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of mode that could be called the Lady Bracknell gambit. Everyone knows it’s a man in a dress but the fact is neither acknowledged nor obviously central to the meaning of the production. Of course, that description could apply to any number of established drag acts, many of whom make no concession during the performance to the gender discrepancy between character and performer. But I think the mode takes on a different valence when performed in a basically straight context such as at the Fringe – it’s almost like a more sophisticated version of the pantomime dame, in which gender play sets the tone for a kind of carnivalesque register that invites the audience to loosen their ties, so to speak.
A salient example would be Diane Chorley: Duchess of Canvey. Chorley is a rounded comedy character, former doyenne of nightclub The Flick – 1980s Essex’s answer to Studio 54 – turned chart success, jailbird and now comeback queen. She has an air of Quentin Crisp as played by John Hurt, all billowing side-parted hair, snake hips and knowing pout, with the nuance and naff cultural specificity of an Alan Partridge guest. (On a memorable card game during a cruise: “I shouted ‘UNO!’ with such gusto I kicked my cork wedge overboard” – and hit Gloria Estefan.) She’s quick-witted with the audience and gets us dancing with original ditties like Dagenham Eyes, as well as clever covers, backed by her five-strong band, Buffet. The drag here speaks to the artifice of the whole situation, and hints at walk-on-the-wild-side partying too. It feels like Chorley’s in on the joke.
A different case in point would be the American play These Troubled Times, which is set in contemporary Florida (see my Scotsman review here). It’s a peculiar, increasingly fantastical piece about a straight couple who go on vacation, leaving their kids in the care of their gay uncle – to the consternation of Mrs Raymond, the God-botherer next door who thinks the end times are near and might be right. The most striking thing about the production is that Mrs Raymond is played by author Troy Diana in full-blooded drag, as an outsized, irrepressible, grotesquely reactionary Divine type. It adds a sense of hysterical too-muchness to a character who might be expected to be shrewish or pinched, perhaps hinting at the sensuous as well as puritanical appeal of overwrought devotion. It also serves to render absurd this paragon of traditional family values – a piece of dramatic irony at the expense of the character.
Michael Griffiths turns this approach on its head in Sweet Dreams: Songs by Annie Lennox. The personable performer sits at the keyboard, in his short, neat hair and button-down shirt, and opens the show by saying, in his distinctive Australian drawl: “Good evening. My name is Annie Lennox.” He then gives us a first-person account of Lennox’s life, punctuated with dynamic new arrangements of her songs, daring us to make an issue of the disjuncture between male performer and female character. (Griffiths used the same gender-blind approach in his last show, In Vogue: Songs by Madonna, which he brought to the Fringe in 2013 and 2014.) As well as making for a deliciously dry show, this read to me as a kind of feminist gesture – a mode that pays its subject the respect of representing their words, experiences and art as such rather than aping their appearance. He is in character but not in drag and it works.
Of course, it’s possible to be in character and in drag at the same time, if you’re an actor playing a drag queen. There was a lot of that at this year’s Fringe. I saw three such productions and had mixed feelings about them all. I Am Not Myself These Days is adapted from Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s memoir of the same name about his stint in 90s Manhattan as drag queen Aqua, a career that ran alongside a rocky relationship with a crack-using escort (see my Scotsman review here). Sticking closely to the book, the adaptation takes the form of a monologue punctuated with a few lip-synch numbers. In this tale, drag and sex work are bedfellows of dysfunction and self-harm; the looks might be flawless, down to the goldfish-bowl tits, but the people are trouble. Without doubting the first-hand experiences represented, the show leaves a reactionary tang: much attention is given to the immediate mess of Kilmer-Purcell’s life, far less to the structural causes that might be underlying it. Drag here functions as a purgatory of self-indulgence and self-recrimination and we’re meant to be reassured and consoled when, at the end, Aqua sheds her wig in favour of chinos, a white shirt and a steady career in advertising.
There are similarly questionable undertones to the Newcastle University Theatre Society production If Only Diana Were Queer, in which we join three drag queens backstage before showtime so that each can tell us their story. Things get off to an uncomfortable start with a cascade of regrettable drag clichés: pink boas, catty bitching, assumptions about boyfriend-stealing and daddy issues. But the monologues themselves constitute plausible and moving accounts of lives spent overcoming prejudice in search of gay community and drag culture. That culture is described as having less to do with female impersonation than with adventures in gender, but there’s little evidence of this in the production itself: the looks are shabby-garish, and not in a good way. It talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk.
Similar ambiguities are found in The Night Shift with Gloria Hole, another new British play in the form of a monologue by a veteran drag queen. Again, there is some unfortunate early pandering to cliché. The opening lines distinguish between drag and trans identity then collapse into stale misogyny: “Just to clarify, I don’t want or aspire to be a woman. I don’t even like women… [predominantly because their genitals are like] the aftermath of an accident or a tarantula’s mouth”. Again, the make-up, hair and outfits lack the sense of creative flair and distinctive individual sensibility that mark the best real-life drag. The musical numbers are okay. But unlike in I Am Not Myself These Days or If Only Diana Were Queer, there’s a much, much better sense here of drag performance as dynamic and conversational: the audience are directly and confidently engaged through banter, singalongs and free shots. And again there’s lots of genuinely convincing material relating to life offstage: how Gloria’s experience has been shaped by performance, politics, family, AIDS and the changing gay scene.
This, in fact, is what links all three of these productions: they are much more interested in and credible on the lived texture of queer lives than the details or delivery of drag performance. Drag seems to function here as something of a bait-and-switch – a high concept or even marketing ploy to get curious punters through the door before taking them to perhaps unexpected places within the queer psyche. There’s ambivalence here then: it’s a shame that none of these plays really does justice to drag performance on its own terms yet it can’t be bad to have an increasing number of productions that are interested in and broadly sympathetic to queer subjectivity.
When it comes to real-life testimony, the strongest instances weren’t channeled through faux trad drag. In Ecce Homo, Nick Phillips recounted his days as Naughty Nickers with Bette Bourne’s iconic experimental drag theatre company Bloolips. Phillips wears make-up during the show but it’s not quite drag; in Bloolips tradition, he’s less an imitation woman than a new kind of man. He recounts his time in the troupe in the early 80s, his subsequent experiences in the US (including with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence), his diagnosis three decades ago with HIV and his life since. The emphasis is on ebullient transgression and the importance of real human contact; there are songs and video but it’s what connects most strongly is the sense of personal witnessing, at both intimate and political scales. Drag here is an invitation to tear up the rules and make one’s own life – a constructive force in more than one sense.
A different kind of testimony shines through the Fringe’s most high-profile production engaging with trans experience, Trans Scripts, written by Paul Lucas with a cast including Calpernia Addams and Rebecca Root. Formally, it’s a variation on The Vagina Monologues mode, weaving material from a huge number of interviews into six individual life stories, taking in childhood, family, school, bullying and abuse, finding community, black-market meds, pageants, church, romance, work, depression, economics, sex work and more. For a piece about life outside the norm, it’s conventional in form but very well executed with all six performers on stage throughout, alternating and occasionally interacting. Mainstream accessibility seems to be a major consideration here and fair enough. For many audiences, this will probably be the one play about trans life they see, and it deftly covers a huge spectrum, even including shifting priorities and current tensions with the trans community and trans politics. It embraces and expresses the idea that there is no single narrative of trans experience – no single way of doing it – using solid theatrical technique to demonstrate very clearly that while its subjects put great thought into their appearance and the impression it makes, they are not in drag.
And finally, when it came to drag itself, there were a few options available at the Fringe. In The Kinsey Sicks: America’s Next Top Bachelor Housewife Celebrity Hoarder Makeover Star Gone Wild!, the American close-harmony quartet delivered a slick, fast-moving, slightly acrid piss-take of famelust (see my Scotsman review here). And homegrown Edinburgh nights C U Next Tuesday Cabaret from Dive (see my Scotsman review here) and Pollyanna at Paradise Palms provided stages for all manner of freaky queer experimenta, drag and otherwise. The sight of Pollyanna host Pollyfilla marauding on all fours around the bar, heels akimbo, was a reminder of the idea that drag can go wild.
But nothing really compared to The LipSinkers: Evolution of the Fags. On their third year at the Fringe, the east London troupe truly found their stride (see my Scotsman review here). In their hands, drag and character and gender and theatre squelch and writhe together, spilling across the room, gesturing towards unknown pleasures and leaving a glorious mess.
