Around a blue-lit, shrunken stage at the Penarth Centre (certainly one of London’s lesser visited hangouts, found in South Bermondsey) last month, a bustling crowd of queers erupted into feverish, teary applause. A performance of Jerker, the 1986 play about phone sex during the Aids pandemic by the late San Franciscan playwright and activist Robert Chesley, had just concluded — and the giddy crowd was about to relocate to a nearby mansion for an after-party.
It was the spot to be that Saturday night, and only the latest in a string of evenings put on by The Aids Play Project, an organisation founded by playwright and director Alastair Curtis ‘to revive parts of our archive or history’, he explains. As of last June, Curtis has been elbow-deep in research, digging out old plays and manuscripts written by those who lost their lives to HIV/Aids, ‘many of which, 40 years later, have been marginalised or relatively forgotten’.
When he finds one — others recent productions have included Harry Kondoleon’s Christmas on Mars and Charles Ludlam’s Camille — Curtis sets about organising a community rendition performed by drag stars, including Sue Gives a F*** and Sharon Le Grand (‘two of this generation’s greatest performers’), Olivier Award nominee actors such as Paul Hilton and Sharon Small, as well as blockbuster, upcoming names to know, Adam Silver, Dominic Holmes and Mary Malone. Camp flourishes come for no extra charge, via costumes made by London studio Allen and Adcock.
This momentum-building project is one of a number of grassroots, LGBTQIA+ performing arts set-ups currently bubbling across the city. Why? Curtis thinks people are turning their backs on the establishment. ‘We are largely unsupported by the bastions of creativity and theatrical innovation in London,’ he says, adding ‘the heterosexual mainstream of the National Theatre or the Royal Court. In the absence of that ecosystem, we have to develop our own.’
It’s not to say there have been no queer-centric performances in top venues. Recent highlights have included the epic performance of A Little Life, a stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel tackling queer life in the States which starred James Norton at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2023; A Strange Loop, the ‘fat, Black, queer body’ musical, arrived on the Barbican’s stage from Broadway last summer, while Cowbois, a ‘rollicking queer Western’, was a sure-fire hit at the Royal Court earlier this year.
But Jeanie Crystal, the musician, choreographer and pillar of London’s queer creative community, agrees with Curtis. ‘The state really does have its grubby hands on queer and trans rights at the moment, so now is the time for us to stand strong and express ourselves,’ she says. ‘It’s so important that we are visible and taking up space.’
For this reason, she is re-joining forces with DJ Josh Quinton. In 2020 the pair founded Faboo (first a Stoke Newington club night putting on extravagant parties with bursts of performance, before turning to a TV show in the pandemic, and morphing into the Fabootique! pop-up shop, which supported new designers from 2021 to 2022). For their next act? Synthetique — a ‘proper’ punk music and performance night. ‘Think Michael Clark vibes — contemporary dancers, ballet, drag queens and your classic punk bands,’ she says. The first night is coming later this summer. ‘Rock’n’ roll needs to be queered up — it’s been so heavily hetero’d.’
An effervescent, creative queer scene is far from new territory for London. In fact, it’s long been an epicentre, Crystal explains. ‘There’s an amazing history of queer icons, those that we know and ones that have come before then,’ she says. ‘Just think of Soho. From Quentin Crisp to Francis Bacon. There’s Heaven as an institution. The Glory. Vogue Fabrics Dalston. There are countless queer spaces which have been protected in London, in a way you don’t really get anywhere else in the world. Every year, more and more queer people get on that train from all parts of the country and are encouraged to bloom and blossom.’
Punk is not the only thing on the menu for London queering. Ballet Queer, the UK’s first LGBTQIA+ ballet company founded by Jonathan Watkins last September, is doing the same for dance. ‘Ballet, in my opinion, is queer and has always been queer. There’s always been queer people around ballet,’ he says. ‘I want to reclaim that narrative.’
Watkins, who was with the Royal Ballet for a decade and a freelance choreographer for 10 years after that, is running an artistic residency at Shoreditch Town Hall, as well as a community dance project for up to 50 Hackney residents, which is running for six weeks.
‘Our first professional piece will be a nod to people in ballet and dance history who have been revolutionary in terms of their queerness. Vaslav Nijinsky [the great Russian dancer] and Sergei Diaghilev [founder of Ballet Russes] were queer. Isadora Duncan is a queer dancer from the 19th century,’ he says. ‘I want to launch the company with a performance that nods to the past but has its roots in the history of now.’
For many, putting on such productions is fuelled by the desire to continue the writing of this city’s diverse artistic output. ‘There is a standard narrative of what queer theatre history looked like — Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer — but there’s no attempt to widen that field,’ says Curtis. ‘That’s partly because they don’t see it as commercial enough.’
In reality, it would appear the appetite is actually greater than ever. ‘The Aids Play Project has sold out within minutes every time we’ve done a show,’ Curtis says. ‘So not commercial? That really doesn’t match our experience at all.’
