“He always slays this shit,” one awe-inspired fan says after One Of Your Girls, which features a video introduction of Sivan in full drag. Her friend responds: “Totally. I’m so sweaty right now.”

So Sivan, mission accomplished.

Reviewed by Nell Geraets

THEATRE
Cruel Britannia: After Frankenstein ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, Until November 30

Classic texts refracted and reimagined through the prism of trans experience are an irresistible lure for Kristen Smyth’s magnetic gifts. Her incarnation of Jesus, reborn as a trans woman in Jo Clifford’s The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, subverted Christian dogma and left transcendent the inclusive ethical crux at the core of many New Testament parables.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a parable of modernity in which an unforgiving gender binary plays a crucial role. Victor Frankenstein’s fear of the feminine, and his masculine desire to usurp and control procreative power, are among the true monsters in the story; the abjection of Frankenstein’s creation – the monstrousness – is a dark mirror of the all-too-human impulse to fear and revile difference, to reject those do not conform to established ideas or social categories.

The gothic tale has long been fertile ground for queer subversion – The Rocky Horror Show, for one. Cruel Britannia is a more high-concept response, transporting us into a deeply imagined and liminal underworld in 1980s London under Thatcher.

It finds the gothic not in university basements and secret laboratories, mountain fastnesses and frozen Arctic seas, but among a homophobic milieu of working-class men, a queer subculture spiralling into new romanticism and punk and novel drugs, and in the torment of a trans woman struggling to emerge in a world that thinks her monstrous.

The text is moody in-yer-face theatre, the world-building brilliantly evocative. Although even those very familiar with the original may find the storytelling lacks expositional clarity, its sustained intensity, the atmosphere of uncanniness and threat created by gender conformity, and an outcast’s quest to find sanctuary all resonate with deeper truths that a more straightforward retelling might miss.

Violent rage and ecstatic release bubble up through the cracks – a reference to Derek Jarman’s darkly subversive queer classic Jubilee is clearly a touchstone. Smyth flickers wickedly between yobbish male personae and Ruby, a repressed female gender identity who cannot ultimately be denied, in a compelling dance with Shelley’s text.

I had a few reservations. The show’s hedonistic riffs might be more fun if they were audience-responsive, rather than entombed behind a fourth wall; the monstering of masculine sexuality – whipped into paranoia and moral panic by TERFs and used to scapegoat trans women – isn’t made manifest with the sharpness or grotesquerie it could be. Neither undercuts the impressiveness of Smyth’s writing and solo performance, which let Cruel Britannia command attention as a trans theatre classic all its own.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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