Remythed dramatises several mythic tales but not as we know them. The premise is that these ancient stories have only come to feature straight cis characters and so this production sets out to remix, reimagine and reclaim them with “queer truth and joy”.
The operative word is joy. In a show developed by Roann Hassani McCloskey and Joel Samuels, the revisionism is enacted with a rollicking sense of fun and mischief. Both are among the cast of queer storytellers, along with Emile Clarke, Ishmael Kirby (performing as drag king Cyro) and Lucy Roslyn. They start off with a protracted welcome, breezily joshing around with each other, before asking for the house lights to be dipped.
When the drama snaps into play it is full of poise, careful choreography and captivating storytelling. They take us to lands where there are only “manly men” and “womanly women” and then subvert them: we take flight with Scheherazade and then enter the garden of Eden where Adam’s first wife, Lilith, rejects him. “But I own you,” he says, as he skulks off and she renames herself Lily (“not man, not woman”) and embraces banishment as welcome solitude.
Lady Godiva has a romance with a “spinster” called Tommy – the show is worth seeing for their simmering sexual chemistry alone – and there is a tender modern-day reworking of the myth about Akan folkloric figure Anansi, celebrating black male homosexuality.
The stories are simply but magically evoked with delightful moments of physical theatre. At 60 minutes, it is too brief a flight into this mythic past and we wish the storytelling had started more swiftly so there could have been more of it.
At the Vaults, London, until 12 March. Vault festival runs until 19 March.
