Douglas
Hodge, who played drag queen Albin in the Menier’s 2008 production of
La Cage Aux Folles, now
simultaneously passes on the baton and returns the favour by directing
this revival of the 1978-81 triptych by Harvey Fierstein, who later
wrote the book for the musical of
La
Cage and who had created for himself the central role of
professional drag queen in search of fulfilment Arnold Beckoff. That
role is now taken by David Bedella, best known as Satan in
Jerry Springer – The Opera.
In the first piece,
International
Stud, Arnold meets the bisexual Ed but refuses to go back into
the closet for him. In
Fugue In A
Nursery, Arnold and his new boyfriend Alan spend an eventful
weekend a year later at the farmhouse of Ed and his lover Laurel.
Widows And Children First is set
several years later still, with Arnold, now “widowed” of Alan, bringing
up a gay teenage foster-son and trying to reconcile himself with his
mother.
Bedella is exceptionally assured as Arnold, using a gravelly baritone
that serves as a working approximation of Fierstein’s own hot-lava
basso. As Ed, Joe McFadden is perhaps a little too ready to trade on
his more or less inherent gee-whizzery. Sara Kestelman gets some
terrific Jewish-mother lines in the earlier part of Mrs Beckoff’s role,
but the part then flattens into a more consistently intolerant
ogre-figure whose function is simply to be an antagonist for Arnold.
Herein lies part of the problem. Not only do the plays portray a
different world (pre-AIDS, although scarcely less dangerous, as Alan’s
offstage death attests), but they come from a different social and
dramatic one. When they were written, any gay drama which crossed into
the mainstream was to a significant extent pioneering. Its revival
comes in a context which has progressed to the point where the debate
about gay marriage is genuinely two-sided, but also one which is more
familiar with portrayals of homosexuality … and, in particular, with
the cliché that “gay doesn’t mean happy”, that such characters all too
often fail in their personal quests, in a kind of repressive dramatic
tolerance. So far from Fierstein’s original achievement and however
intentionally, to a demanding eye today the work can even seem a little
reactionary.
Written for the Financial
Times.