To Be Straight With You
Reviews
To Be Straight With You
REVIEW ... Nottingham Playhouse
by Donald Hutera
The Times | Monday Apr 21 2008
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As a gay man and the founding choreographer and director of DV8 Physical Theatre, Lloyd Newson has never been shy of tackling taboo subjects. In Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men in 1988 it was male alienation and desire. Five years later MSM examined cottaging — men seeking men for sex in public toilets — via dozens of interviews.
For his latest work, which had its [UK] premiere at the Nottingham Playhouse, Newson has returned to the interview format but broadened his focus. To Be Straight With You is 75 minutes of verbatim theatre on the complex topics of intolerance, religion and homosexuality that uses spoken and prerecorded text, dance and digital animation to amplify its points.
Newson has assembled a stirring, possibly angering and sometimes saddening collage of views and stories from a small army of people embodied by nine multitalented performers: the Rastaman, whose invective is not entirely intelligible but whose brutal thinking is plain; the DJ who, with knowing irony, spins violently homophobic Jamaican tracks, a Zimbabwean pastor's daughter manhandled as she tells the tale of a lesbian friend raped with a beer bottle.
Although words are its springboard, this is in many ways an accomplished dance performance. The actors move in startling, strikingly sustained ways as they talk, and in styles that range from a mirror-image bharatanatyam duet to a sedentary ensemble line dance. A septuagenarian Israeli twirls like a top as she compares religion to electricity in its ability to liberate or destroy. A teenage Muslim from Hull recalls being knifed by his own father after coming out, and all the while he skips rope.
The show is episodic and didactic around the edges, but Newson and his designers have beautiful surprises up their sleeves. A lecturer appears to stand inside the globe as he indicates countries where homosexuality equals the death penalty. A gay Nigerian Christian explains that he has led not just two but maybe four lives, all of them quickly illustrated via digitised full-body comic strip panels. But it is human feelings and political themes — fear, courage, hatred, injustice, invisibility, compromise — that matter the most here.
