What am I for any more? That’s the question the “Queen of Ireland”, Panti Bliss, asks in this latest solo show, which contrasts the country she grew up in, where performing in drag was a radical act, to the queer-friendly nation of recent years. With all she fought for secured, and with cross-dressing now “defanged and Instagrammed” to within an inch of its sequined life, “Why the fuck,” asks Panti – AKA Rory O’Neill – “am I still in drag?”
There are moments in If These Wigs Could Talk when audiences may find themselves asking the same question. Few drag expectations are met here. There’s no music, no song – and if Panti is camp, it’s more solitary tent than a whole row. There’s comedy, at a stretch, in the form of a choice one-liner about LinkedIn and two anecdotes distinguished less by comical incident than storytelling flair. Panti makes them entertaining, but must work to do so, selling the one about a substitute boyfriend as more outrageous than it is and ramping up the embarrassment – in the one about smuggling a dildo through security – to off-brand levels.
Beyond comedy or cabaret, this is more Appearance With …, in which our host trades on the interest in her life she’s entitled to assume as a bona fide national treasure. Fair enough: it is a remarkable life and she gives forceful account of it. They bear repeating, these testimonies of a conformist – and very recent – Ireland, fearful of and hostile to difference. Panti’s decades-long journey, from rejecting to embracing her national identity, is brought feelingly to life – and with shades of grey where it would be easy to paint in black and white.
From the act whose Abbey theatre speech on marriage equality made her a gay rights figurehead in Ireland, the show’s closing moments take on the character of a rally, as Panti rails against the reactionary temper of our times – and rediscovers her raison d’etre. A recurring subplot, about her relationship with her dad, helps offset the self-mythologising, ensuring her story is not just that of an icon, compelling though that is, but of a human being.
• Panti Bliss: If These Wigs Could Talk is at Soho theatre, London, until 10 June.
