Victorian painter Elizabeth Thompson is bizarrely held up as an inspiration to contemporary trans, queer and non-binary people in Ellen Brammar’s play, which has a ribald cabaret energy but hardly any depth or subtlety. It’s full of cartoonishly repetitive scenes and garishly broad drag-king performances, sporadically interrupted by short and uninspiring songs from Rachel Barnes.
In this touring production for Hull-based company Middle Child, Brammar and co-directors Luke Skilbeck and Paul Smith seem happy to shove a jumble of artistic conceits, statements on gender and sexuality, and truisms about the patriarchy on stage without actively exploring them.
A shame, because there is plenty of potentially fascinating material here. Thompson painted military scenes: her picture The Roll Call was so popular at the 1874 Royal Academy summer exhibition a policeman had to guard it, and it was bought by Queen Victoria. But her hopes of actually joining the RA were repeatedly dashed by its pale, male and stale committee. Her sister, Alice Meynell (played here as a drily arch trans woman by Fizz Sinclair) was a noted essayist, suffragist and poet, shamefully passed over as Poet Laureate after Alfred Tennyson’s death.
Though a pioneer in her time, Thompson is an odd role model for gender fluidity or wider egalitarianism: she married an army officer, had six children and ended up as Lady Butler. Brennan writes her, and Emer Dineen plays her, as an arrogant monster: her nickname, Mimi, is apt. Convinced of her singular genius (the title song is rendered in a sardonic drawl), she’ll simper for the RA blimps to further her own career. But she has no interest in helping other women advance, especially not the working-class ones who paid a shilling to see The Roll Call, here represented by non-binary teenager Bessie (Libra Teejay).
The idea of artistic selfishness, and of the false modesty expected of women, aren’t developed: they’re just loudly declaimed, again and again. Dineen’s Thompson, swanning in a shoulder-baring fuchsia gown, smugly declares her manifest destiny. A squad of male academicians twiddle their moustaches and fiddle with their cigars until one of them declares: “But she’s… a WOMAN.” I lost count of the number of times this scenario played out.
Fans of Ronnie Baker will enjoy LJ Parkinson’s repeat performances as a double-taking blowhard, though, who tells us pointedly that it will “probably” be 57 years before a woman is elected to the RA. Alice, likewise, speculates that a woman probably won’t become poet laureate until 2009.
The songs (A Talent Like Me, Bossy Women) are as heavy-handed as the social commentary. But the overall sense is of randomness, of decisions made by default rather than with purpose. The language is contemporary and slangy. Queen Victoria has a servant in leather pants who feeds her Skittles. The best song, Three Years, sees the cast miming and grinding to their own electronically distorted voices. This show is animated by a delight in putting queer, trans and vaguely feminist themes in front of a receptive audience: but not much more than that.
