★★★★★

“raw emotion is never far from the surface in this attention grabbing show”

Billed as an exploration of the realities of being gay in an impoverished rural community, ‘Two Come Home’ is a gut-wrenching drama that is a huge credit to its highly talented queer cast and crew.

Previously performed in Brighton, the show has an unmissable four-day run at the King’s Head Theatre, Islington as part of the Camden Fringe Festival. There’s a compelling, raw energy to this piece by Joe Eason which is set on the wrong side of the tracks in small town, deep south America.

The multi-talented Eason also co-stars in his own play and has in addition both designed the show and composed its haunting music. Kirsten Obank-Sharpe’s direction is meticulous, keeping the focus sharp throughout. She is also a member of an on-stage three-piece band, together with Cam Southcott on violin and Elizabeth Cleone Hopland on cello.

Evan’s dad has been jailed for ten years for violent crime. His gay son is clinging to the wreckage of a broken affair that ended a decade earlier. His mum (Nicola Goodchild in a wild performance full of sad energy) is a dysfunctional addict who has never learnt to love him. What happens when Evan’s ex (Ben Maytham) walks back into Evan’s life and will love rekindle in these most desperate of times?

As Philip Larkin famously wrote, ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’. Besides the gay love story, there’s an important second narrative here about the failure of familial love. Come what may, raw emotion is never far from the surface in this attention grabbing show. There’s plenty of that strength of feeling in the furiously frustrated language the characters exchange, and there’s wit and poetry too.

Joe Eason’s design is simple and to the point, with some effective lighting adding to the atmosphere generated by the off-key, melancholic score. A highpoint was his voice and guitar rendition of a beautiful song about love lost. The chemistry between the two estranged lovers is electric, helped by intimacy coaching from Marina Cusi Sanchez. James Burton blisters with toxically dangerous energy as Caleb Nicolson.

At the end it’s left to a woman cop (a deft and witty performance by Hannelore Canessa-Wright) to act the Greek chorus and deliver a final message: ‘Just drop the drama! Happiness is a choice’.

I’m not able to report why the playwright chose the American rust bucket setting. This Brokeback vibe has big screen reasonance. The show’s publicity cites its relevance to young audiences. Do similar dramas play out in rural Norfolk or Wales today?

THE PINK LIST at the King’s Head Theatre

★★★★

“Michael Trauffer packs an enormous amount into this engaging and perfectly performed show”

The Pink List, from the creators of ‘Fabulett 1933’, explores the treatment of gay men by the German state through the eyes of Karl Hellwig (Micahel Trauffer), a fictional character drawn from compilation of the life experiences of many concentration camp survivors including Karl Gorath, Heinz Dörmer and Josef Kohout. Only a very few courageous and resilient gay victims of the National Socialist regime publicly spoke about their experiences after the war, due to the continued criminality of homosexuality. This play with music, uses their testimony and first-hand accounts to portray events, including incidents in the camps, verdicts of criminal trials for ‘immoral actions’ between consenting adult men and their exclusion from the schemes for compensation of victims of the Nazis.

The pink lists created by the Nazis to allow them to track and target gay men for shipping to the camps, continued to be used to identify and prosecute men in both East & West Germany after the war. It is the context of such a trial, that of Karl, that structures this short piece. Set in 1957 and with the recorded words of the judge (Richard Simon Fridrich), prosecutor and arresting officer triggering Karl’s memories. We see Trauffer using cleverly simple, but effective, changes of costume and minimal props to enact with passion and sparks of humour, Karl’s early crush on a fellow Scout and his finding of ‘his people’ in the cabaret clubs of early 1930s Berlin. The subject of one of the two songs that received a deserved round of applause, ‘Home’. A visceral re-enactment of his punishing existence in the two camps in which Karl is imprisoned is delivered with conviction and appropriate emotion. The chilling image of a Christmas under guard contrasting starkly with that of the family Christmas of his childhood crush.

The second ballad to receive applause was the heartrending ‘Nothing’s Ever Really Over’. It describes Karl’s post-liberation search for his past family & friends ‘walking over the debris of a nightmare’ with the ‘shadows of the SS Guards right here’.

Whilst necessary to give a dramatic context the play, perhaps, dwells too much on the pre-war and wartime story that is well known from other dramas, films and novels. The more interesting and in a sense, more compelling part of the narrative; Karl’s arrest, trial and imprisonment under the infamous Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which was not ‘de-nazified’ as other parts of the law were after 1945, the sentence which would not acknowledge the years spent in concentration camps as off-setting time to be served for the 1957 conviction and his search for recognition and recompense for his persecution and victimhood seemed not to be given due time and space through re-enactment. The failure of the state to acknowledge that, and even to continue to use the Nazis’ pink lists to maintain persecution of the victims by imprisonment is a story that needs to be told and awareness of it raised. This extended monologue with songs, delivered with emotion and flashes of humour by its author is a good start in doing that.

The final song, ‘I’m Still Here’, a rousing anthem for all of those, like Karl, who were overlooked and whose persecution was continued by the German state, gives further testimony of the struggles which continue for LGBTQ+ recognition in some parts of the world. The German government only apologised for the persecution of gay men under the Nazi regime and in post war years in 2002, annulled the post war convictions under Paragraph 175 in 2017 and in 2022 announced plans for compensation for gay victims.

The Pink List may only be an hour, but Michael Trauffer packs an enormous amount into this engaging and perfectly performed show.

TWO COME HOME at the King’s Head Theatre

★★★★★

“raw emotion is never far from the surface in this attention grabbing show”

TWO COME HOME at the King’s Head Theatre

Reviewed on 15th August 2024

by David Woodward

Photography by J. R. Dawson

Previously reviewed at this venue:

TWO COME HOME

TWO COME HOME

THE PINK LIST at the King’s Head Theatre

★★★★

“Michael Trauffer packs an enormous amount into this engaging and perfectly performed show”

THE PINK LIST at the King’s Head Theatre

Reviewed on 5th August 2024

by Thomson Hall

Photography by Sarah Morrison

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE PINK LIST

THE PINK LIST