Philip Venables – nose ring, shaved head, black hoodie – is prancing in one corner of the rehearsal studio like a marionette yanked around by an unseen puppeteer. It is all part of the British composer’s efforts to convey to the 15-strong company the desired tempo for this section of his score for The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, which premieres at the Manchester international festival next week. Adapted from Larry Mitchell’s underground manifesto-cum-fable, published in 1977 and inspired by the author’s experiences of queer communal living, it is set in the land of Ramrod, where the tyrannical patriarchy (the men) is mocked, defied and plotted against by the faggots and their friends, who include the faeries, the faggatinas and the women who love women. Through their solidarity, they find the strength, as well as the silliness, to endure and overwhelm their oppressors.
Venables’ impromptu display works so well that the show’s musical director, Yshani Perinpanayagam, who is padding around in socks with the word “Fuck” on the soles, asks him to demonstrate how the next section should sound. By the end of the afternoon, the densely layered music has acquired a grinding relentlessness. Director Ted Huffman, whose previous collaborations with Venables include an opera based on Sarah Kane’s gruelling final play 4:48 Psychosis, sits everyone down on the floor for a debriefing. “I can see you all starting to glaze over,” he says. “So I wanted to reassure you that the piece is built that way, metaphor-wise, to show what it’s like to live in the men’s world. Next week, we’ll move on to the lighter, gentler part.” With that, the performers disperse, clutching their various instruments: accordion, cello, violin, lute.
Light and gentleness have not hitherto been a major component of the Venables/ Huffman brand. Their 2019 opera Denis & Katya reproduced the online cacophony surrounding the deaths of two Russian teenagers during a police siege, while their abrasive adaptation of Kane’s play caused panic attacks among audiences. The Faggots will be more of a love-in than a landmine. “I hope people will feel as if they’ve had a big hug,” says the 44-year-old Venables, seated next to Huffman on a lime-coloured sofa. “It should inspire a need for change but also a sense of inclusion. Sort of, ‘Let’s do this together.’”
He came across the book in 2013, then sent it to Huffman four years later when its message of resistance felt especially pertinent in the wake of Brexit and Trump. “It made me look at the world in a new way,” says the boyish 46-year-old director, a former child soprano who made his operatic debut at the age of 12 singing with Pavarotti.
Venables nods in agreement: “The way it talks about the capitalist patriarchal system we’re all trapped in really resonates,” he adds. “But it’s done through this magical, positive, empowering approach where the faggots are central to this world. That’s the POV of the book.” Huffman, who is also responsible for the show’s text, takes up the idea: “It’s unapologetically queer. The power relationship is turned on its head. Men are the aberration of faggots. Everyone starts out as a faggot, and it’s the men who have a sickness of the mind.”
Whenever that word has been adopted by queer artists, it has usually been confrontational – most notably, in Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots – but in Mitchell’s book it becomes a badge of whimsical delight, comprehensively reclaimed. “One of our goals is seeing what it’s like to say and sing the word ‘faggot’ very lovingly, hundreds of times over the course of an evening,” says Huffman. “Can we change the feeling of it for that hour and a half?” For him, a native New Yorker, the word has a different charge than it does to British ears. Has it lost any of its toxicity? “Depends on context, right? If a friend jokingly calls you a ‘faggot’, it feels very different from when a stranger screams it from a car window. Both happen.”
One challenge in adapting Mitchell’s book has been to find a musical language equivalent to what’s on the page. The writing has a sing-song, storybook quality, augmented by Ned Asta’s intricate, Aubrey Beardsley-esque illustrations. Potential tweeness is tempered by Mitchell’s profane imagery (there is much talk of “magical cock fluid”) and radical impulses. “The book is purposefully archaic, with this weird, folksy beauty,” explains Huffman. “One way we meet that is to use popular idioms from different centuries. The book erases conventional ideas of time so it makes sense to have these things swimming next to each other in the same pool.”
Venables’ music draws on the baroque tradition. “We’ve got some period instruments as well as modern ones,” he says. “We’re mixing it with folk music or a more vernacular style. There’s a bossa nova in there. Fundamentally – and this is one reason why it’s not an opera – the score is not a complete map of the piece. We’ve chosen our cast partly for their talents in improvising as you would in a baroque opera. We have people switching instruments on stage, or singing when that may not be their primary skill. We’re using some operatic voices but we’re trying to create a more community-focused music-making and theatre-making.” This approach was evident during rehearsals earlier when Joy Smith, a harpist, was getting to grips with a practice chanter, which looks like a recorder and sounds like a drowsy kazoo. “I can get a low C,” she offered. Venables listened to the result then wrinkled his nose. “Sounds a bit farty,” he said.
The goal, he tells me, is to be “exquisite rather than perfect”. This chimes with one of Huffman’s bugbears. “I do think in the classical music world there is an emphasis on virtuosity and difficulty that is at the forefront of how those pieces are made, rehearsed and presented,” the director says. “Here, the virtuosity is more in everyone occupying a level playing field and being protean. We see less of a fixed identity for each performer on stage, and to me that also feels queer. The process of making the piece hopefully mirrors the politics of the content.”
A bigger question, which continues to inspire soul-searching and chin-scratching in the world of opera and classical music, is how to make these art forms accessible across class, race, age and other potential barriers. “There’s such a huge audience out there for whom this music – and not just The Faggots – could, if presented and created in an interesting way, really reach them,” says Huffman. “And it doesn’t, so instead we have this exodus of people who should be our audience.”
Venables strikes a more hopeful note. “I think we’re coming to a golden age because companies are waking up to the need for new stories, and new ways to express old stories, and that’s going hand-in-hand with other changes, such as re-examining the canon and its values.”
More worryingly, this is also an era of renewed attacks on queer and transgender people – exactly what Mitchell’s book predicted would happen once those communities gained any ground. “The backlash against trans rights feels retrogressive,” says Venables. “But I’m hopeful. One thing the book does so well is to trivialise the men. It does what big astronomy does – it makes you feel very small, and that capitalism, religion, the monarchy and the patriarchy, all those things that constantly work against us, are children’s games. They will pass.” Huffman smiles and adds: “I want the audience to see that even small changes can be revolutionary.”
• The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is at Home, part of the Manchester international festival, 28 June-2 July; then at festival d’Aix-en-Provence 7-9 July, and Bregenzer Festspiele 27-28 July.
