Brighton Year-Round 2024

Queers

Brighton Little Theatre

Genre: Contemporary, LGBTQ+ Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Performance, Theatre

Venue: Brighton Little Theatre

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

“I’d miss you.” A gay century survives 100 years of glaring wrong and comes out – singing of Oscar Wilde. Mark Gatiss’s Queers – seven monologues curated by Gatiss who supplies the first himself, directed overall by Joseph Bentley hits Brighton Little Theatre for the briefest of runs till April 13^th.

Monologues, direction and above all performances are outstanding. You’ve today and tomorrow: don’t even hesitate with reading this till you’ve booked. In just on 2 hours 45 with an interval, there’s not even a dip of energy in this chronological dip into queerness of all kinds.

Mark Gatiss The Man on the Platform (1917)

Dipping is what happens in this first monologue. Glass-clear water in an old shell-hole, where a captain and private strip and share a moment of communion. Directed by Harry Atkinson, Tom Slater-Hyndman’s Perce recounts why he’s been posted away from his medical unit.

It hinges on his friendship with one Captain Leslie who insists on his first name and reveals his corn-yellow hair. As A.E. Housman notes in one poem, “they’re hanging him for the colour of his hair”. But neither suffer that fate. Someone whom Housman was writing about obliquely, appears on another platform to the one Perce is about to go on. Someone famous Perce saw when he was 15, pointed out by his father.

And now he’s on a train, and sees his friend. Can he reach him, just to say something? It’s a beautifully layered performance, full of reveals and the knowing looks: “a certain liquidity of the eye.” Tom Slater-Hyndman’s confiding wink of confession, to someone he doesn’t know, but who might have that same liquidity (all of us), is both detailed and transfixing.

Jackie Clune The Perfect Gentleman (1929)

Clune’s best known as an actor, currently appearing in the Old Vic’s Just For One Day. Directed by Emmie Spencer, Erica Thornton’s Bobby, or Burlington Bertie on occasion, relates how she discovered what she desires.

Then somehow the means of freedom after heartbreak: in disposing of a master’s old clothes now Oxford brogues are in vogue. This act of transformation mean she can be the perfect gentleman of the title. Freed to lounge and order at a pub, passing as a man, she attracts many women. One wants more, much more sexually than a perfect gentleman should give.

Thornton’s wink of a performance is so good you’d swear she’s flashing a polished monocle at you. The ache of desire as her first love responds to then violently breaks off their embrace, the ache of knowing another desires you but not who you are, and above all a moment at the end of rapt transportation, are more than touchingly rendered.

Jon Bradfield Missing Alice (1957)

Directed by Susanne Crosby – who directed the fifth ply here as well – the eponymous Alice (Sam Nixon) relates how, as a heterosexual girl of 16 she ha a child out of wedlock. Damaged goods, she’s pushed into marriage to charming Michael, though fancies his younger policeman brother Charlie, who goes to seed. Michael doesn’t, but doesn’t desire poor Alice.

As ‘damaged goods’ she’s told to make the best of it. Can’t go compromising a policeman’s career. One moment of mutual desire produces their daughter Violet. But she’s with a man now: years pass.

What Nixon reveals – in a performance worthy of Maggie Smith in its timing – as one director put it, is that gulp of hesitation before the bleakness. Or the laugh. Relating her husband’s ‘friends’ she cites: ”Pierre… from Carlisle.” A hairdresser in fact. How Alice accommodates herself to gay culture and – beat you to it – its 1957, the Wolfenden Report has just landed – is mesmeric. Bradfield’s monologue is a gift, and Nixon returns it with interest.

But this companionable word, one to which Alice inches into content with, might be threatened. “I’ll miss you Alice” is a beautifully rendered line and if you seek one reason to go, this performance is it.

Matthew Baldwin I Miss the War (1967)

Overall director Joseph Bentley helms this delicious reminiscence, just at the point of legalisation and the removal of some of that danger, Carnaby Street Jack (Allan Cardew) celebrates: as the Kink’s “Dedicated follower of fashion” is on the tailor’s lips: he fashions the fashion in more ways than one.

Particularly during the war when in the blackout like eels, those at the bottom of the sea, could slither across each and pass in the open streets for once. But one, green-eyed, apple-cheeked young American, is something far more than a slither.

Even if “my buttocks are flapping open and shut like a Venus flytrap.” Baldwin’s delicious script is so full of bon mots you’ll want to write them down. But you can discover the rest for yourself, in Cardew’s phenomenal performance: an old soak, who reveals there’s a couple of things you must do at his age. One of them is covering mirrors.

Brian Fillis More Anger (1987)

Again directed by Susanne Crosby Phil (Jake Marchant) s a jobbing actor fed up with dying: of AIDS in every TV soap and feature film by page 18. When he gets the soap regular spot of Clive, he’s delighted. Till he reads the next script of Clive, and the next. I mean of course he goes to Hemel Hempsted with his partner and out of the rear-view mirror.

And to cap it all the director wants ”more anger darling” to stereotype his rage at the government the homophobia, Thatcher’s blocking of aid for AIDS as hetrosexuals don’t get it. Fillis allows Marchant room to nuance a range of throw-aways.

But there’s the beautiful Simon. And – it’s not the tragedy you think, Jake isn’t going to cough his way out of this like a film part: nothing so deadly and so soap-ish. But fashions change, politics grows worse. Will he find his own rage? Marchant’s funny, wickedly timed, refusing the easy options, as does Fillis.

Michael Dennis A Grand Day Out (1994)

Screenwriter Michael Dennis we know in the theatre  from The Dark Sublime, at Trafalgar Studios and a year ago at BLT. This is a masterly small script, even finer in its way. Sarah Edinburgh’s directions is flawless and reveals layers as the young subject pauses, shifts, doffs his jacket.

Particularly in allowing the hesitations, malapropisms (just wait for “hyperbole”) and darting discoveries of a 17-year-old boy hoping the law will discover he’s legal. It’s that day where 16 as the age of consent is debated in the Commons.

Above all it features Jimmy Schofield’s phenomenal Andrew who in this young actor’s hands leaps into life with a shrug of a jacket, a suggestive sprinkling of salt and shake, and crunch as he takes it in his mouth. From someone so young, his performance is a revelation and Schofield will surely be seen in remarkable things soon.

Down for the Commons debate and a scuffle outside Number 10 (nowadays he’d be locked up as a terrorist, look how far we’ve come in another way) his chief concern , we discover latterly, is if he’s been filmed. But more immediately, he’s met Marcus of the BBC. Accounts. He had been intending to go home but this spontaneous protest ah changed all that. It’s not that he’s naive, there’s a boy at home whose intimate company he enjoys. Andrew just asks himself, does he want this? Mmm. The last throw-away line is the funniest thing in the whole show.

Gareth McLean Something Borrowed (2016)

That rush of marriages after legalisation. Jo Gatford directs this sparkling, light-hearted script with a beating heart of Scottish coming-out with a flip of a tartan tie. Adam and Steve sounds ideal. And Steve (Phil Nair-Brown) flourishes the nerves and lack of them, that Steve feels as he’s about to give a speech. There’s notes, there’s champagne, there’s notes. And champagne. No chance of repeating jokes then.

Nair-Brown is panache personified, with Steve rushing through his pre-marital nerves he ensures with a gallimaufry of theatre-business we never miss pauses. The contemptuous pulling of an Asda cracker, a moment of confetti where you least expect it, those balloons. It’s a fizz of a script and a performance. Clearly a celebration rather than just exploration (though there’s plenty of that in bullying and his mother’s love), it’s like a perfect sorbet.

Steven Adams furnishes a set  a little like Little Wars last October, but a bar or seedy club, not a drawing room interior, faded in plush and fitted out for the century so to speak, framed pictures on dark walls.  Each actor takes a space and for each act, their monologue completed, turns their back, occupies a corner.  Dingily lit and spot-lit by Beverley Grover with a period tang, and with Millie Edinburgh’s sounds and period music (she operates all this), each epoch’s neatly conjured, with a brief video projection of the date.

All I can repeat is: see it.

Published April 12, 2024April 13, 2024 by Simon Jenner