more than one gay theatre
If you assume that gay theatre is either finally “out of the ghetto” because it’s in mainstream London venues or somehow still closeted because it wants to appeal to a mainstream audience – as in Mark Shenton’s post on the Guardian theatre blog – then you’re setting a very narrow trap for yourself.
It also helps to remember that gay performance and theatre work is being made outside of London: glasgay! and Queer Up North immediately spring to mind as major queer arts festivals held in Glasgow and Manchester respectively. If we have to stay within the M25, there’s GFest, London’s own LGBTQ festival heading into its fourth year of work and currently seeking submissions. What these festivals have in common is the sheer diversity of modes of representation, and the multiplicity of lives, desires and stories within them.
The idea of “niche or not,” or “realistic or not” doesn’t apply, and acts as an unhelpfully reductive way of trying to describe what’s involved in those festivals. And that’s before we even consider the professional work being made all year round outside of mainstream venues and mainstream practice – such as the numerous and growing applied and theatre in education projects tackling homophobia and gender identity.
In other words, recourse to the limited dynamic of in/out to describe gay theatre is to confine it to a particular historical moment does not exist any more – or is, at the very least, being speedily re-written. Does the closet still exist? Yes. Does it fully describe what contemporary queer performance involves? Certainly not.