To Be Straight With You

This powerful new piece from Lloyd Newson and his DV8 physical theatre company – seven male, two female – combines verbatim documentary with stunning movement and a rich mix of visual and video techniques. The effect, though, is cumulative rather than evolving: in a series of tableaux, stories and testimonies, the lack of a governing narrative line takes its toll.

Still, To Be Straight With You never feels less than white hot, topical and urgently felt. Having set up an opening blast of homophobic dance hall vaporising – boogie on down with bigotry – we are hit with a battery of information in between the cool moves and ingenious cartoon tracery of light and colour.

Many Eastern European countries, including Russia, are resistant to sexual equality. Eighty-five countries, many of them former UK colonies, criminalise homosexuality. Jamaican gay bashing, as revealed on home movie footage, is horrifyingly constant. And moving the polemics of Peter Tatchell and his Outrage! group centre stage, we hear a direct appeal for Muslim gay colleagues to sign up, come out and fight the good fight.

None of this will ruffle feathers in a consensual National Theatre audience, of course; there is an inevitable element, here, of preaching to the choir. But the voice of new Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson’s wife on tape denouncing “unnatural acts” is still shocking. And the renewed worldwide religious fundamentalism is doing untold damage to progress and maturity; we often seem to be plunging backwards to another dark age.

In illustrating this thesis, Newson’s show contains some disturbing social tales, two of them executed by the brilliant Ankur Bahl, first as a non-stop skipping Muslim from Hull who drinks vodka under the stairs with his Mum and becomes “just another stabbing” in a tragic act of domestic violence; then as a dancing gay boy who’s not really gay, and married. There’s also a gay Nigerian pastor and an immigrant Iraqi doctor who finds solace in what he calls Britain’s “healthy system.”

When the company assembles for a seductive sedentary cowboy dance sequence, fleetingly touching on paedophilia, you lament they don’t explode in ensemble purpose more often. The balance between text and dance is a constant challenge to groups like DV8. But in truth there are not that many groups as talented and innovative, even twenty years on.

- Michael Coveney