“Over the course of the play, no antagonist is revealed, and little conflict truly arises, resulting in a flat conclusion”
Performance itself lies at the heart of The Prince, Abigail Thorn’s playwriting debut at Southwark Playhouse’s Large Theatre. Characters find themselves stuck inside a multiverse of Shakespearean dramas (Though the action is mostly confined to Henry IV Part I) and at odds with the rigidity of their roles. Sam, played by Joni Ayton-Kent, who is cast as a number of nameless bit characters, is desperately searching for a way out. Mary Malone plays Jen, who finds herself in a similar situation and decides to tag along with Sam. Jen, however, finds tensions within the ways in which the primary characters perform their gender, and begins to poke holes in their constructed identities. In particular, Jen reads Thorn’s Hotspur as a trans woman and Corey Montague Sholay’s Prince Hal as a gay man. Over the course of the play, both characters waffle between conformity to their roles and self-actualization, a broader metaphor for the struggles endured and decisions faced when butting up against a rigid gender binary, especially the construct of masculinity. Though The Prince suffers from a lack of narrative coherence, the metaphor is powerful and at times quite personally affecting.
Thorn and Malone, both in principal roles, turn in strong performances. Malone plays Jen’s fish-out-of-water bewilderment with earnest charm and comedic timing. The funniest moments of the play come from the ways in which other characters play off of hers. Thorn, as Hotspur, carries the show. She peels back her character’s internal tension in careful layers and remains nimble and forceful in her handling of both her own verse and Shakespeare’s. The scenes in which she actively decides to continue in the role of the masculine hero at the expense of her own identity carry tremendous weight. It is unfortunate then, that the structural foundation of the play is unable to support these performances.
The Prince seems to eschew both coherent world-building and narrative signposting, both of which are essential when leading an audience through a multiverse. The moments when Jen is able to break the Shakespearean characters out of their performances are nearly indistinguishable for the moments when they remain stuck. In essence, these breaks happen at random, giving Jen little to learn about the mechanics of the world into which she has been dropped. Sam’s desire to escape should be easily aided by a magical map of sorts, represented by a somewhat unconvincing plastic tetrahedron, but the object only appears all-powerful in Jen’s hands, though no context is given to allow the audience to understand this discrepancy. These two characters are also denied specific or rich inner lives, even an inkling of who they might be outside of their current situation. The multiverse device primarily exists in absentia, as most of Sam and Jen’s haphazard narrative hopping occurs within Henry IV Part I. The play’s only detour into Hamlet arrives without much context and serves only as justification to shoehorn in the “To be, or not to be?” soliloquy, though Thorn delivers it well. Over the course of the play, no antagonist is revealed, and little conflict truly arises, resulting in a flat conclusion.
Martha Godfrey’s lighting design feels similarly uneven. The tubes of LED light that hang at odd angles above the playing space are visually compelling and seem to indicate different corners of the Shakespearean multiverse. But their function remains out of sync with the play throughout, illuminating, changing colours, falling and rising without impetus or textual justification. Rebecca Cartwright’s historical costumes, on the other hand, are a strong point of the play’s design—the ways in which they mutate alongside Jen’s poking and prodding is masterful.
Though it contains joyous and raucous moments, as well as symbolic significance, Thorn’s debut remains unnecessarily messy throughout, wanting for narrative drive and formal consistency.
MY SON’S A QUEER (BUT WHAT CAN YOU DO) at Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★★
“there’s lots, and I mean LOTS, of camp queer joy and comedy in the show”
Not to sound like a complete weirdo, but I’ve been following Rob Madge’s career for quite some time. I think my first encounter might’ve been a performance of them playing the Artful Dodger in a telly promo performance of Oliver! And then (or it might’ve been before) as Gavroche in the 25th anniversary concert of Les Mis. I think I shared with many others in the delight of seeing their old VHS tapes pop up on Twitter a couple of years ago of them performing as a kid in their living room. So I’m definitely a fan. I was very much also that kid who played dress-up instead of football and used to make my parents watch me “perform” (I use the term loosely) to a CD soundtrack of Disney’s biggest movie hits. Unfortunately, unlike Rob, my parents weren’t that into it and didn’t really know how to work a camcorder. But it did make this show incredibly relatable.
At the setup, we’re welcomed into Rob’s living room where they’ve been practising for their next show. We’re invited into the tech rehearsal. The stage is warm and cosy: an armchair, some drawers, and a small cabinet with family photos atop. The instrumental to zip-a-dee-doo-dah is playing as we take our seats. The show is a mix of original songs and stories from Rob about their stagey childhood, difficult times at school, and queer awakenings, broken up with a fabulous selection of family videos from the old camcorder. The opening song includes the line ‘even though the stage is small’, which might’ve been the case when this show first premiered, but it’s actually on a pretty big stage now in Edinburgh, and deservedly so! But it’s nice to get a sense that Rob’s ambitions are still even bigger.
Besides just being an incredibly talented performer and singer, Rob is also wonderfully charming. They are so easy to watch, and even easier to root for. The humour is on point, and I personally adored the very niche musical theatre references to the likes of Connie Fisher (the winner of BBC One’s talent competition to find the next Maria) and the seventh of Henry VIII’s wives… the swing in Six the Musical! I think every queer adult in the audience could relate to Rob’s first teenage crush on the Pied Piper of Hamelin. We all had our own Pied Piper, I’m sure.
Though there’s lots, and I mean LOTS, of camp queer joy and comedy in My Son’s A Queer, there’s also certainly moments of poignancy; as Rob’s school teacher knocks their confidence, and basically tells them they need to fit into a box that they don’t feel like they belong in. Rob is very grateful for their family, and acknowledges how lucky they are to have them; their dad lifting them up to help them fly, and reading in for all the other parts (sometimes even getting the lines right); their grandad who built them their very own little theatre, and their grandma who was quite happy being spun around on an office chair to replicate the tea cups at Disneyland. But they also acknowledge that not everyone is so lucky. And a message from their dad about parenting really sums up what it should be all about. I look around towards the end of the show to find it’s not just me wiping away the tears… it’s quite a lot of us. The show and Rob’s performance is incredibly touching. For some of us, perhaps there’s a sense of grief for the queer childhood we weren’t able to have. And for others, maybe some hope for the current and future generations of queer young people, who might just be lucky enough to have a family like Rob’s. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions for sure, performed with flair, talent, and total commitment to the camp theatricality of it all. My Son’s A Queer is a brilliant show. It deserves full houses, and I hope it gets them.
Reviewed 12th August 2022
by Joseph Winer
Photography by Mark Senior
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