The National proudly presents Queer Theatre season

Pride in London has kicked off ahead of this weekend’s parade, and the National Theatre has partnered with it to look at how theatre has explored LGBT+ stories. Its Queer Theatre season also marks the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. It comes hot on the tails of the theatre’s sold-out version of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which captures a snapshot of life in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

For Pride Weekend, a world-class group of actors and directors are bringing five seminal queer plays back to the theatre for rehearsed readings. LGBT+ directors were given a choice of plays, allowing them to work on those that resonated most with them. Many of the texts are from a time when LGBT+ representation on our stages was rare, if not unheard of.

Sarah Frankcom directs Neaptide

Dramaturg Tom Lyons, who has put together the National’s season, says: “Anniversaries are just opportunities to mark something – what makes this any more significant than 40, or even 49 years? Since we put Angels in America on, which is a brutal but beautiful play, we wanted to put it in context so that you can see the progression: before, after, and ongoing.

“I wanted to create a journey, with theatre that reflected or propagated change. Art has always been a place to question who we are and what we’re doing. There’s no ’round of applause, we’re all done’ at the end of our final performance of the season – we want to ask, what else should we do?” Post-show talks will explore the issues in the plays in a wider context.

Sarah Daniels’ 1986 play Neaptide was the National Theatre’s first full-length play by a female playwright. Sarah Frankcom, the artistic director of the Manchester Royal Exchange, directs a reading of the story of lesbian mother Claire – played by Call the Midwife star Jessica Raine – who is in the middle of a bitter custody battle over her daughter and facing challenges in her teaching career. It is framed around the ancient myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone. 6 July, 7.30pm. 

“Neaptide sees people question the character’s validity to be a parent,” says Tom. “Adoption rights have advanced, but people will be able to see the relevance now and look back in anger. There was a real growth in LGBT+ theatre in the late Seventies, with the founding of theatre company Gay Sweatshop, and playwrights such as Bryony Lavery, who wrote polemically about the experience, in a feminist manner too. Neaptide came during this movement. Although it seemed a cautious play, for the time it was a big step.”

Tarell Alvin McCraney, writer of Wig Out!

Tarell Alvin McCraney, writer of Oscar-winning phenomenon Moonlight, stars in his 2008 play Wig Out!. Drag queen subculture is brought to life in a bold play that questions masculinity and gender and highlights the importance of chosen family. Wilson and Eric fall for each other, but when Wilson reveals his drag alter-ego Nina, can the two make it work in their differing worlds? 7 July, 7.30pm.

“When you live in a positive, metropolitan environment, like London, New York or Paris, you might forget – but you can feel very alone outside of that space,” says Tom. “Wig Out! is all about counter-cultural safe spaces, and gender queerness and non-binary aspects that are very significant today.

“Moonlight was a bittersweet story. In Wig Out!, Tarell imbues characters with fun, lip-syncing cheer, then the audience is emotionally churned. Wig Out! is totally different from Moonlight, but is the brother or sister of that film, in terms of the nuance. His characters are unashamedly who they are – covering the whole spectrum, LGBTQIA+. In later plays, you get that nuance, and see that it is not a simple, single experience. It is a community united in its difference.”

Peter Gill directs his play Certain Young Men

Award-winning writer and director Peter Gill directs his 1999 play Certain Young Men, with a cast including Broadchurch’s Jonathan Bailey, presenting poignant snippets of the lives of four gay couples who portray the inescapable differences within the queer community. Is gay life defined by hedonism and casual sex or fighting for coupled-up suburbia? 8 July, 7.30pm.

Tom says: “Peter made plays as a gay man before the Sexual Offences Act. It’s a play about sex lives – post-Grindr, post-Tinder, it’s interesting to see that play, as it shows that the issues have been there for decades.”

Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry presents a reading of Martin Sherman’s 1979 play Bent, with a star-studded cast including Simon Russell Beale, George MacKay and Angel in America’s Russell Tovey. Set in Nazi Germany, gay lovers Max and Rudy are sent to Dachau concentration camp. In a bid to avoid the dreaded pink triangle that marks out the homosexuals, Max claims to be Jewish, but meeting fellow gay campmate Horst changes how he sees the world. 9 July, 2.30pm.

Stephen Daldry directs Bent

Tom says: “Bent, then and to some extent now, was not greatly known about, but it was a landmark production, starring Ian McKellen. It was a very real portrayal of gay men, and attitudes around at the time. There was a political swell in the Seventies, and Bent was on the crest of that. It was seen in the refracted view of LGBT+ people at the precipice of the AIDS crisis. In Chechnya, the pink triangle has been re-appropriated by them as their insignia.”

One of the first plays to provide an insight into queer counterculture, Mae West’s 1927 play The Drag scandalised New York and was banned after just ten performances. Ninety years later, playwright Polly Stenham directs the story of closeted socialite Rolly, son of a homophobic judge and married to the daughter of a gay conversion therapist, who gets more than he bargained for when he hosts a drag ball in his drawing room. Olivier winner Adrian Scarborough and Sacha Dhawan, best known for The History Boys, are among the cast. 10 July, 7.30pm.

Polly Stenham directs Mae West's 1927 play The Drag

“The Drag is so outwardly what it is,” says Tom, “but she rewrote it as The Pleasure Man, making it heterosexual – she censored it herself.”

Censorship was a big issue before the Sexual Offences Act was passed. “Before 1967, your play was unlikely to go on if it was overtly homosexual,” says Tom. “The 1965 John Osborne play, A Patriot For Me, was played at the Royal Court, but the Lord Chamberlain banned it, so they set up a private club upstairs so that people could see it. This made a mockery of the whole system, and led to the unwinding of censorship in theatre. Before, people such as Tennessee Williams and Terence Rattigan were writing in metaphor. Out of necessity comes great art, and then they found they could be more explicit.

“It’s a chicken and egg effect – to what extent is theatre reflecting change, or propagating it? Culture helps to push shifts, like Osborne’s play. The floodgates opened, so more could follow. As rights advance, different issues come to the fore. After the legalisation of gay marriage, domestic plays become key, for instance.”

Many people see the AIDS crisis as a turning point for queer representation on stage, too. Tom says: “You forget how huge it was until you see or read Angels in America again – half or a third of your friends would have been wiped out. From devastation, something will change as a result.”

Tom explains his goals for the season: “The exercise of bringing together five plays in five decades plus is a fraught one; everyone has a favourite play specific to them. We want the season to inspire people to talk to us post-show about other plays personal to them, to reinvigorate the conversation. Theatre is best when you feel individually connected to the play but also part of a wider collective.”

So what does the future of LGBT+ theatre hold? “I think the B, and even more so the T – which wasn’t even part of the acronym for a while. The trans experience is now more at the forefront of the political movement, and is galvanised. But there are risks, if you see something like the Caitlyn Jenner reality show, that you only see the unique experience of a conservative white millionaire. We need to interrogate this and make work about that. The National’s festival for youth theatre and schools, Connections, had a play called Pronoun, performed by 30 or 40 youth theatre companies. It was about a trans male aged 16, and had input from the charity Gendered Intelligence. It was a first step into that.

“There is still amazing work being made. Each generation has a state-of-the-nation play for the LGBT+ community. We don’t know what the next will be – will it be about integration, or the plurality of experience? We don’t want everything to go mainstream; we need places like The Glory and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, to keep that vibrant ecology we have in the theatre, and keep the dialogue, but we also need to ensure representation both onstage and backstage at the National.”

Intersectionality is essential, too. “The 1967 Act was a long act, but it was only partial, between two men. So legislation was always misogynistic – lesbian sex was never illegal,” says Tom. “It was important to ensure that as much of the experience was captured, so Neaptide explores a lesbian experience, and Wig Out! and The Drag look at gender. Wig Out! is also mostly a black cast. It is easy to tell the white male experience of homosexuality, but equality is much more expansive than that. It’s a short little acronym – but huge.”

Tickets £15, nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/queer-theatre

Originally published: PA Diploma News