What applies to Dublin’s busses applies to Dublin’s gays it would appear. You wait around to see a gay on the Irish stage and three festivals full of them come at once. As we await to hear if the Queer Notions Festival gets some much needed funding to make its second journey out of the closet and into the Project Arts Centre, this month sees the welcome return of the 6th annual Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, taking place at venues all over Dublin City Centre’s north side. It faces some stiff competition from the Absolut Gay Theatre Festival that runs concurrently and which in spite of this being its first time, avoids the awkward fumbling that may be expected of it with a theatrical line up so diverse it puts the repetitiveness and groundhog plays that litter our main stages and our fringe to shame.
But do we need it? Is there a need for even one festival that services the LGBT community in Ireland? Elizabeth Moynihan, writer and director of Slaughterhouse Swan believes there is. “We obviously still need a specific festival because there are no representations of gay life on the main stages. You just get the token characters on television and film and no representation at all in theatre.
“It’s great for me, having lived through the 80s, to see young gay couples embracing openly and holding hands, like heterosexuals have done since the dawn of time, but we still have stuff to say and stuff to do. There is still queer bashing going on.”
“We envy you for having such event,” says Roy Horovitz, star of the Timekeepers. “To have two festivals that are competing with one another… I think that’s wonderful. We don’t have anything like that in Israel. We have plenty of plays dealing with gay matter but nothing that brings them all together.”
There aren’t that many arenas in which LGBT performers and writers get the opportunity to portray their work and Martin Lewton from Naked Homo thinks it’s essential to be able to see other gay theatre and meet other gay theatre practitioners. “None of the English festivals or the European ones have these great banners up or have the involvement of people from the council. That’s a really good thing.”
The festival features a mixture of traditional theatre, musicals, cabaret and comedy with all aspects of gay life represented, though that rare Irish bird, the Lesbian, seems to be unusually quiet yet again.
Totally Dublin has cast its overly-critical eye over this year’s Absolut Gay Theatre Festival and picked its tips for you to splurge your pink pounds on.
Tennessee Suite
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by David Kaplan
Written by Tennessee Williams in 1980 just before his death, Tennessee Suite is the title to a pair of plays that are erotic, funny and play with the passage of time and ponder the endurance of desire. The first, The Traveling Companion, is set in a hotel and depicts a standoff between an aging writer and a young man picked up at a gay bar and hired as a travelling companion.
“It is a distorted self-portrait,” Kaplan tells me “with a certain amount of self-mythologizing. It deals with loneliness and it’s very unusual for him to be this direct about himself.”
Chalky White, meanwhile, imagines a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by older men and younger men, younger men and their protectors. “The language is very beautiful and very strong and it’s different to the lyricism of his early plays.”
The Studio Theatre, Smock Alley
10 May (20:00), 11 May (20:00), 12 May (20:00), 13 May (20:00), 14 May (20:00), 15 May (14:30, 20:00)
The Time Keepers
Written By Dan Clancy
Directed By Lee Gilat
The Time Keepers is an hilarious drama focusing on an unusual bond formed in a concentration camp between an elderly, conservative Jew and a shrieking homosexual, who in normal circumstances would never cross paths, but having been thrown together form a friendship in a time of horror.
“We are second- and third-generation so we are very sensitive to the issue of the holocaust – The Time Keepers is not by any means a mockery of the event.” Roy Horovitz, one of the actors tells me. “There are many studies and testimonies where they say survivors used humor to survive and we found a very large book by a well-known researcher from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which collected the caricatures and jokes that were told in the camps and ghettos. People stayed there for years and years and continued to live within terrible surroundings.”
The Studio Theatre, Smock Alley
3 May (20:00), 4 May (20:00), 5 May (20:00), 6 May (20:00), 7 May (20:00), 8 May (14:30, 20:00)
Naked Homo
Written and Starring Martin Lewton
Directed By Andrew McKinnon
A show looking at contempory gay life, Naked Homo is a one-man piece performed completely in the nip by writer Martin Lewton.
“It came out of the fact that I was working on a series of plays which dealt with how people saw themselves, life models and women dieting, etc” says Lewton. “I wanted to connect it with the gay world. There are a wide number of gay men who aren’t out, gay men cheating on their wives, homophobic homosexuals, a guy cruising in the showers at the gym. There’s one set at Gay Pride and another guy looking back on his lover who died of AIDS. Some are humorous but they all say something about the Gay world today.”
The Boy’s School, Smock Alley
10 May (21:30), 11 May (21:30), 12 May (21:30), 13 May (21:30), 14 May (21:30), 15 May (16:00, 21:30)
Slaughterhouse Swan
Written and Directed by Elizabeth Moynihan
A tale about love and obsession set in a small town, Slaughterhouse Swan is one of the few original Irish productions at this year’s festival. Written by the awardwinning Elizabeth Moynihan it deals with a butcher and his wife, the parents of twins. The father is a cross dresser and the story begins as their son comes back unannounced after a ten year absence. We don’t know why he has left and we don’t know why he is home and his twin, who feels terribly abandoned, is just out of prison after having an affair with her piano student, who was under age. Amongst its themes the play challenges debatably repressive laws that govern underage sex.
Moynihan doesn’t believe that Irish theatre meets the needs of the LGBT community. “Dolly West’s Kitchen by Frank McGuiness is, to my memory, the only play to have a gay character in a mainstream production at the Abbey. There is something wrong about the picture that plays with gay characters are confined to a gay festival. This isn’t a gay play. It’s a drama. It’s about a woman who falls in love with someone the law says she shouldn’t.”
In reviewing Moynihan’s Walnuts Remind Me of My Mother last year, Peter Crawley raised the point the her work was the only original piece of writing in the Festival dealing with lesbian issues by an Irish writer. “I wonder why there aren’t more young twentysomething lesbian writers writing about women’s issues or gay women’s issues. I mean, I am a middle-aged woman. No one is coming forward. They’re not being rejected. I don’t know what it says about us. It’s not good.”
The New Theatre
10 May (18:45), 11 May (18:45), 12 May (18:45), 13 May (18:45), 14 May (18:45), 15 May (13:00, 18:45)
Two Loves
Written by John Martin Stephens
A musical drama that merges modern-day dialogue with Shakespearean sonnets and the American songbook, this original drama follows the seduction of a young man by a poet and his mistress.
“I didn’t want to write an appraisal of the Sonnets because so many other people have done that.” Says Martin Stephens. “What I was more interested in was how 400-year-old source material could make a modern and compelling drama. I tried to stay as true to the themes of the sonnets themselves, taking as little license as possible. ”
The New Theatre
3 May (18:45), 4 May (18:45), 5 May (18:45), 6 May (18:45), 7 May (18:45), 8 May (13:00, 18:45)
Weepie
Writer Chris Goode
Director Donald Pulford
In November 1994, two nineteen-year-old, upper-middle-class students were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Mohammed el-Sayed. There was no obvious reason for the murder. The victim was unknown to the perpetrators and there was no racial motive. The British public, who explained the Jamie Bulger case to themselves by saying that these boys were from the criminal classes, couldn’t put the el-Sayed case down to class nor deprivation. Weepie, written by Chris Goode, attempts to find an answer to the case – one area the play explores is the type of masculinity that men are encouraged to adopt. Another is the temptation to chase an experience which is sublime, out of the ordinary.
“One of the hundred reasons I love this script is that it isn’t a beginning, middle and end kind of story,” says Director Donald Pulford, who stalked writer Chris Goode after first seeing Weepie’s first showing in Edinburgh, directed by the author, and knew he could do a better job. “The script is full of texture and rhythm and imagery and if you try and connect them you’ll probably drive yourself crazy. It’s more of an aesthetic event. We are looking at rhythm, space, and scale of action, atmosphere and weaving of a pattern. For me the greatest challenge is to make something as ugly as I can and as beautiful as I can.”
The New Theatre
10 May (20:00), 11 May (20:00), 12 May (20:00), 13 May (20:00), 14 May (20:00), 15 May (14:30, 20:00)
€10.00 / €13.00 / €15.00
For a full program of the Absolut Gay Theatre Festival see www.absolutgaytheatre.ie/
