Wig Out!

A lot of big compliments have been flying around the young head of black American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, many of them deserved (none more so than the Evening Standard most promising playwright prize), but Dominic Cooke’s production of a drama usefully summarised in the New York Times as “this gutsy, pulsing portrait of uptown drag queens and the men who love them” is a severe disappointment.

There are one or two remarkable performers, but Cooke’s tour of the drag ballroom scene in a Miltonic struggle between the camp caucus in the House of Light and its dynastic rival in the House Di’Abolique (where Billy Carter’s Satan, aka Serena in leather straps and Halloween face paint, despatches Drew Caiden’s punk henchman Loki to join battle on the catwalk) is more Vauxhall Tavern follies than Armani armed warfare.

Somehow, the sting and grace of McCraney’s idiomatic writing – so compelling in his Young Vic plays this year, The Brothers Size and In the Red and Brown Water, has been lost. And the socio-cultural dimension of African American gay men struggling and squawking to establish their own hierarchies is completely missing.

The main auditorium has been ripped apart by designer Ultz to create a raised glossy catwalk, a travesty of a transvestite traverse, I suppose, where the guys gallivant, goaded along by the Fates Three, a singing girl group in shiny lurex. The climactic Cinderella ball should have been a riot, but the costumes are so poor and low-rent you feel you’ve been hoodwinked into attending a last ditch charity bash for Woolworths. Where’s the glamour, where’s the sexiness, where’s the fun?

This show is in the wrong theatre, with the wrong director, and most of the actors seem about ten years too old for their roles. The promising start, where the drag queen Wilson/Nina (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, a sort of feminine version of Naomi Campbell) picks up the “ordinary” queer boy Eric “the Red” (Alex Lanipekun) on the metro is subsumed in the vagaries of the House strategies and the squabbles between the other residents and the bad boy caretaker Lucian (Danny Sapani).

Each character starts a tale of gender-bending personal history with the mantra “My Grandmother wore a wig.” So, now we know: every tranny has a granny! Gravelly-voiced Kevin Harvey as the “Mother” of the House threatens to take over the show with her growls and witty sideswipes, but runs out of steam – and text – as the show bumps and grinds on. At one point she’s dressed in what looks like a baby’s pink jumpsuit, not a good idea. Bring on the pantomime season.

-Michael Coveney