Tag Archives: Cleo Henry

In the Beginning

★★★★

Katzpace

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In the Beginning

In the Beginning

Katzpace

Reviewed – 10th February 2020

★★★★

 

“The foam padding around his hips and his flaming red wig are presented as just as authentic as the mud and green of the countryside”

 

‘Performing the words of Alex Marlow, please welcome to the stage… Alex Marlow’. Written on Subterranean Homesick Blues style placards, the opening of In The Beginning aptly opens a show that perfectly embodies the new wave of self aware, contextualised drag performance.

London is currently home to an exciting and innovative culture of burlesque that challenges and pushes the limit of what is traditionally seen as drag. From the rise of Drag Kings in collectives like The Pecs to The London Short Film Festival opening with a night of alternative drag, showcasing cabaret that centres around neurodivergence and race, this is an exciting place to be. With this show, writer and performer Alex Marlow and director Deirdre McLaughlin offer a highly personal and sensitive contribution to this, ultimately pulling at the corners of cabaret itself and seeing where its limits are.

The show jumps around between genres, from mainstays of drag like the lip synch, the clanging double entendre and the intense eye contact with the audience, to more serious formats such as poetry, personal memoir and long moments of introspective silence. What complicates this is that they are not sealed off from each other but intertwined and overlapping. There are intense poetic monologues delivered in full drag and lip synched numbers in jogging bottoms. All the while, Marlow is narrating small vingettes of his life now and his life growing up queer in rural Lancashire, tackling huge topics with personal specificity and grace. This erratic combining does not make for a confusing piece, however, but for one that is touching and funny, requiring the audience to second guess their assumptions about gender, performance and power at every new combination.

The success of this relies heavily on Marlow as the single performer. Luckily, he is an excellent one. His physical performance is by far his strong point as he throws his body round an almost empty stage, flipping from catwalk to skulking to modern dance. He also has incredible comic timing, as is showcased in a short, strangely emotional skit about anal sex and guava which he performs whilst happily snacking on the fruit which he has pulled out of his bra.

Although sparsely populated, the staging and props of this piece create one of its strongest features. Marlow flips between wearing a wig and not, and whilst he isn’t, it sits on an elevated wig stand, watching over the proceedings like a judge. Drag is about layers, traditionally the adding of them. Make-up, padding and prosthetics take the natural and make them unnatural. Marlow complicates this by constantly playing with these layers and shifting around in them. Clothes are taken on and off in quick succession, a full face of makeup disintegrates but shiny earrings remain. There are also long poetry sequences about nature and the pastoral, surely the most ‘real’ thing which most drag avoids dealing with for precisely that reason. Marlow runs into it, however, relishing in the smell of crushed nettles and smearing mud over his impeccably done face.

The smartest move he makes is that none of these layers are prioritised. The foam padding around his hips and his flaming red wig are presented as just as authentic as the mud and green of the countryside. Drag can be gritty reality as much as it can be escape from it. Although perhaps some of the writing could be neater and the transitions between sketches smoother, this is a dazzling piece of cabaret that shows that there is no truth under drag but rather, like turtles, its drag all the way down.

 

Reviewed by Cleo Henry

Photography by Holly Revell

 


In the Beginning

Katzpace until 12th February

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
Dead Reckoning | ★★½ | May 2019
Everything Today Is The Same | ★★★ | May 2019
Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fuck. | ★★★ | May 2019
You’re Dead Mate | ★★★★ | June 2019
Romeo & Juliet | ★★★★ | July 2019

 

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Body Talk

Body Talk

★★★

VAULT Festival 2020

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Body Talk

Body Talk

Crypt – The Vaults

Reviewed – 29th January 202

★★★

 

“tackles really important issues that are woefully missing from mainstream discussion”

 

One of the tests for any fringe production is how it utilises the limitations of its own staging. Some productions fight against the lack of wings, the black floors and the white lighting as if they are projecting the play they wish they could have made. Some, however, take these limitations and use them to their advantage. Body Talk, currently running at VAULT Festival, is one of the latter.

Writer David Hendon and Directors Chris Davis and Sam Luffman use the intimacy and bareness of their stage to mimic an impromptu support group as three men, with wildly different experiences, explore and narrate their relationships to their own bodies and how living as a gay man has impacted that. As they tell their stories, they help each other by playing different parts, weave physically between each other and eventually feature themselves in the narratives. This kind of interweaving does a great job at demonstrating the huge complexity and intersectionality of the issue of gay male body image. The AIDS epidemic meets mental health, isolation from family meets social media and alcohol abuse meets eating disorders. Hendon’s script is clear in its message; that without an open dialogue, the gay community can do each other huge harm as these vectors collide.

However, this is very much a performance led by its issue and tailored to deliver a very specific message. This makes the writing quite hammy at times, with characters delivering some lines that sound more like leaflet slogans than dialogue and occasionally seeming more like archetypes than actual people. The final scenes are particularly dense with this as the moral of the story is driven home far more explicitly than it really had to be, ending on a note not dissimilar from an after school special.

Even the most clanging lines, however, are handled admirably by the three actors. Particular note should be given to Dominic Jones in his role as the closeted Carl, battling an eating disorder whilst hating his ‘skinny’ body. Jones gives a nuanced and intensely moving performance. He hits the comedic notes excellently, especially the more physical comedy as he acts out the parts of the other men’s stories. But even more impressive is the depth he gives the often oversimplified camp of his character. Whereas camp is often played just for the humour or wit that sits on the surface, Jones brings out the tragedy and fragility that is actually embroiled with it. His complete reliance on his best friend Becky and his almost compulsive mentioning of her is an aching example of this and is also a common but underrepresented part of growing up LGBT+.

Body Talk is a script that needs a little more polishing before it can flow seamlessly as a performance. However, it tackles really important issues that are woefully missing from mainstream discussion and does so in a clear, impactful way. These are stories we should be seeing on our stages and the cast are convincing as they start to right that wrong.

 

Reviewed by Cleo Henry

Photography by Steve Gregson

 

VAULT Festival 2020

 

 

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