Every year, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras brings us a slew of inclusive and representative theatre. It’s especially significant this year as Sydney celebrates WorldPride, marking a whole season of LGBTQIA+ events across the city.
While there are literally hundreds of items on the program this year, everyone has found their own way of celebrating this spotlight on the city and its LGBTQIA+ communities.
For me, it’s largely been the theatre this year. Here’s four plays we managed to catch at New Theatre, Seymour Centre, Belvoir Theatre and Hayes Theatre.
Jumpers for Goalposts
One of the highlights of New Theatre’s annual program is always the Mardi Gras play. With JUMPERS FOR GOALPOSTS, a staging of Tom Wells’s 2013 romantic comedy, the Newtown-based theatre continues its winning streak.
Barely Athletic are a five a side soccer team in Hull’s LGBTQI+ amateur footy league. Publican Viv (Emma Louise) likes to boss everyone about, but her biggest motivation is getting her recently widowed brother-in-law Joe (Nick Curnow) out of the house. Beardy busker Geoff (Jared Stephenson) dreams of playing a song at WorldPride. Shy Luke (Sam Martin) has only joined because he has a crush on athletic Danny (Isaac Broadbent), who harbours a secret.
New Theatre does a lot with their little space, setting the entirety of proceedings within a dingy locker room. Yet it never feels claustrophobic, allowing these characters to shine on their own accord. Yes, it goes straight for the heartstrings, but it’s also a rare play that acknowledges the history of the struggle for equality while landing on an optimistic note.
JUMPERS FOR GOALPOSTS runs from 7 February to 4 March at the New Theatre in Newtown.
Blessed Union
Billed as the “lesbian break-up comedy we didn’t know we needed,” Belvoir Theatre’s second play of the year follows Ruth and Judith, a couple who have been together for decades, who declare to their children Delilah (Emma Diaz) and Asher (Jasper Lee-Lindsay) that they are ending their relationship. Frequently hilarious, writer Maeve Marsden’s freewheeling debut looks at the alternately funny and heartbreaking moments of a family attempting to stay together when every aspect of their lives (from gender identity to race) is politicised. Filled with food and relatable moments, the performance we attended got a warm response from audiences.
BLESSED UNION plays at the Belvoir Theatre in Surry Hills from 11 February to 11 March.
CAMP
Although WorldPride has put a highlight on the ’78ers who marched in the first Sydney Mardi Gras, Elias Jamieson Brown’s new play hastens to remind us that the Campaign Against Moral Persecution (the eponymous CAMP) began their activism almost a decade earlier. Sitting and watching this at the Seymour Centre, across the road from so many important moments of activism at the University of Sydney, you can feel that history in the floorboards. Using key photos and footage from the era, the play takes literal snapshots of an era — with the actors ‘freezing the frame’ at key moments. While it leaps back and forth through time at a rate of knots, and is necessarily didactic in parts, but it is a vital link to the past and future of the LGBTQIA+ cause.
CAMP is at the Seymour Centre in Newtown from 15 February to 4 March.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
As you walk onto the ‘deck’ of Hayes Theatre’s cruise ship of a show, you know it’s going to be a fun night. You know the film, you know the song, but if you also know Hayes, you know it’s going to put its own stamp on the legend.
There’s some minor gripes of course: even taking some of the winking subversiveness of the film, it’s still a fairly heteronormative narrative. Musical director Victoria Falconer still hasn’t shaken the habit of stopping the show cold for 20 minutes to give us a solo piece (I’ve seen her do this bit at least twice at Hayes in the last year, and once more will make it a schtick).
Yet, as Sydney theatregoers already know, Georgina Hopson is a force to be reckoned with. Here she delivers a staggering piece of vocal acrobatics as she turns ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ on its head. It’s a moment that brings the house down — and the audience to its feet for a rare mid-song and mid-show standing ovation.
GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES runs from 16 February to 25 March at the Hayes Theatre in Potts Point.
