It begins with a woman humming. She stands defiantly at the edge of the stage, arms crossed, looking out into the packed auditorium (still ringing with chatter, house lights up) and sings wordlessly – a low, circling tune just loud enough to be picked up by her body mic. By the time she opens her mouth to add words – “It’s been a long time and we are still not free” – to the same melodic riff, the silence in Home’s Theatre 1 is absolute.
It is the first of several moments of stripped-back beauty in a show that somehow manages to be both grittily DIY and sensuously extravagant. The stage is a black box, with wooden chairs and musical instruments strewn around its edges, like a village hall before a rehearsal. A single small bell hangs down on one side. It is rung periodically to mark what might, in a different sort of piece, be called scene changes. Placards are also occasionally used as low-tech intertitles, displaying important names and places – though who could possibly forget “Warren-and-his-Fuckpole”, despotic ruler of “Ramrod”?
Composer Philip Venables and writer-director Ted Huffman have a rambling 1977 subcultural fairytale-manifesto by Larry Mitchell to thank for this particular brand of anarchic queer satire. Some of Huffman’s text is taken directly from Mitchell’s novel, some has been adapted. But the basic narrative about the subjugation by “the men” of “the faggots” and their friends (“the women”, “women who love women”, “fairies”, “queens”) – and the latter’s eventual self-liberation – remains recognisable. So, too, do some of the original’s period-piece gender politics, which grate at times against the production’s evident commitment to intersectionality.
What Venables and Huffman have achieved, though, is to give Mitchell’s utopian vision of loving collective action a physical shape. The performers do double- or triple-duty as instrumentalists and singers, narrators and dancers, their transitions between these roles virtuosically, mesmerisingly fluid. At one point virtually every performer takes up a violin, those visibly less familiar with the instrument playing a single note as a drone, to exquisite effect. At another, a Britten-ish lute song segues into a bossa nova, while elsewhere the entire cast erupts into minutely coordinated body percussion and one of Venables’ passages of baroque semi-pastiche kicks off a courtly dance. Taken as a whole, the show is at times both baffling and chaotic – but served up with such raw energy and panache, it’s also irresistibly, unforgettably compelling.
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is at Home, Manchester, until 2 July, part of the Manchester international festival 2023
