Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Second Class Queer
Kumar Muniandy
Genre: Drama, LGBT Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Studio at C ARTS | C venues | C aquila
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A bold, witty and moving autobiographical solo performance exploring queer identity, diaspora, racial injustice and the search for belonging.
Review
This one man play follows Krishna, a queer Indian-Malaysian man, who attends a gay speed-dating event in Berlin. We witness a number of short chats where we learn of his struggles to be respected as a gay man of colour in Asia and Europe, and how he is not at peace about his role in the death of his mother. The play has some dance elements and screen projections but the majority of the play finds Krishna being grilled by and opening up to the various guys he is paired with. His emotion is raw, well-crafted, honest and occasionally funny.
Setting the bulk of the show with Krishna at a gay speed dating event in Berlin is a brilliant choice, a believable microcosm where profound details about family history and personal experiences can believably surface. So often, dramas struggle to find situations where characters really would spell out important facts or back stories; and it kills the veracity of the drama. Not here. At this speed dating event, it is totally believable that Krishna would give these stories, emotional reactions and personal details when faced with this range of characters. I will not spell out the minutiae of all of Krishna’s speed-dating chats but they range from cultural appropriation, to white privilege, sharing experiences of racism, sexual preferences and laying your personal ghosts to rest. Thanks to Muniandy’s emotionally authentic portrayal of Krishna, the speed-dating chats gradually unpack his recent and historical family, personal and societal stories and help us understand the emotional impact of being a gay man of colour from a lower status community in India and Malaysia, now living in Berlin. He is an outsider everywhere. There is also a very personal and disturbing story of homophobia and corruption surrounding Krisha’s mothers death, which we see evidence of in a gripping video at the end of the play.
Instead of playing all the characters himself, a convention often used in one person shows, Muniandy has instead had the voices of the five or so “speed daters” he chats to pre-recorded, by actors of differing levels of believability. Some are very convincing, one or two rather wooden and sounding like they are reading a script. I hope these will be re-recorded for more convincing portrayals as those interactions broke my concentration. It is a bold decision to fill half of your live stage drama with pre-recorded voices, which we hear over the speakers, and which Krishna interacts with just sitting on a chair, meaning the majority of the play is static. But in the hands of Muniandy’s capable, convincing, emotionally truthful portrayal of Krishna, the lack of movement is irrelevant and many of the audience are visibly moved as they hear the details and witness the emotional toll of a character who will never fit in, whatever society he finds himself in. As a mixed race gay man, I understand this well, and found the portrayal and stories capture the complexity and humanity of this reality. It is a hidden gem that deserves a bigger audience.
