BUTTERFLY (3.5 Stars)
BEDLAM CHORUS
VAULT FESTIVAL, LONDON
This was my introduction to the work of Bedlam Chorus and my first thought was how appropriate that name is (in the best possible way, no shade). There’s something gloriously ramshackle about this outfit, from the malfunctioning home-made costumes to the, at times, barely audible storytelling. They seem not to care whilst at the same time caring intensely about the performances they’re delivering, which is no easy thing to pull off.
The trains shuttling overhead drown out the already quiet monologues and at times I felt frustrated that crucial pieces of the lives being presented had been lost to me.
The only story that didn’t suffer this fate was the one dealing with an LGBT Youth Centre in rural Wales in the 1980s, which was miked up with a band and full of a kind of agitprop energy that carried it along where the others floated, or sank, in quietude.
The show, based on extensive research, offers hidden histories of queer lives lived on the margins: a female impersonator in the navy during World War II, a female lothario in 1732 who fashions a false beard out of her pubic hair and proceeds to marry fourteen women, to a young Scottish trans teen in 1899 who fakes her own murder in order to live as a boy, and a Punjabi lesbian in contemporary Britain.
These monologues unfold across the hour but never cohere into an overarching sense of how they might connect. At the start there’s some suggestion they’re all dead but as they never actually converse, the monologues stand alone and I was left with little sense of how they connect other than through their focus on LGBTQI lives, and the Kylie disco finale within the context of the World War II drag queen narrative felt unimpressively anachronist and a bit of a damp squib.
The performances, however, were – apart from being too quiet – engaging throughout, especially the 1980s Welsh sections and an impressive amount of ground is covered in such a short space of time and given that it appears during February’s LGBT History Month, the show’s importance is self-evident.
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2020, Jonathan Kemp, London, theatre review, Vault Festival
