About a week ago I was driving back from Brighton and heard two people on Radio 4 talking about La Cage aux Folles at Regents Park Open Air Theatre. Their appraisal was so staid and joyless that it sucked all the colour out of the car as I was driving. At one point one of them said “I could see that everyone else was enjoying it much more than me,” and having just seen the show myself I can only fear that, for them, that sentence applies to the entirety of the shared human experience that has been thrust on us.
This is just pure unadulterated joy on stage, and it is done SO WELL. We were thoroughly entertained. What an incredible night at the theatre.
I have skin in the game here, I’ll admit it. Lou and I met because of amazing Ryan, costume designer extraordinaire. He was there tonight. We almost came to a matinee so Lou could get back to Brighton in good time, but he quite rightly said we needed to see it under the lights. We did.
God it was fabulous. Everything you could imagine. Sexy cancan, sequins and big dresses and bigger numbers. I’m full of the show. The tunes are buzzing, the performances are bringing smiles in memory. As soon as the curtain call started every single person in that house immediately stood to clap. Very few empty seats. Very many happy people. We wanted to send the energy back, to thank them for the joy.
A French teacher at Harrow made my class watch the original seventies film. I first encountered this story as a stranger. So I was a protected teenage straight boy at a traditional all boy’s school where the focus is narrow. “The world outside is wondrous wide but here the world is narrow,” says the school song. We sang it but didn’t understand it. Some of my lot still haven’t seen the width. They’ve remained narrow. You don’t need to evolve culture or kindness or morals or expansive thinking when you never have to really struggle. It doesn’t make them baddies. They’ve been tricked into a narrow frame. They don’t know that they are lost. There are lots of people from these delightful institutions who feel they have experienced life but have actually experienced a lovely safe puppet show with the word “life” written below it. They’ve been laughing and pointing as behind the stage people are hacked to death and burnt to power the lights. “I understand suffering,” they say, thinking of that sad-faced little doll called “suffering” that they felt sorry for. “I understand privation,” they add, remembering how long it took to get served their drink at the interval. But I digress. This idiom or whatever it is, it gets my point across but it doesn’t really hold water much as it is fun to write. They’re all so varied, but many are definitely still stuck. My eventual intent with it is to illustrate that I came to this Cage aux Folles story as a baffled outsider to queer culture.
Lots of my erstwhile schoolfriends still believe that being queer is a choice. They have enough self knowledge that – being very straight – they would have to go against their own nature to fancy men. Then they miss a thought. It’s like a record skipping. They go from “I would be weird and forced if I tried to be sexy with a man” to a conclusion that being queer is unnatural. If pressed on it they gesticulate towards certain obscure passages in Leviticus, while ignoring vast swathes of celebrated antiquity. My generation mostly has no context as Ancient Greek was being phased out in public schools, probably because of the normalcy of same sex love in the biggest book in the canon – The Iliad. Achilles and Patroclus.
Buy a copy of David Logue’s book “War Music”. Read his modern reworking of the death of Patroclus. If you don’t feel something you’re made of stone. It’s the most incredible piece of work and Homer made it before things were being written down.
I’m getting distracted very easily here. Sorry.
But. Yeah. Read War Music. And if you can get one, get a cheap seat for Cage aux Folles – £25 we paid each and the view was great and we were part of a very very happy audience. Weather is always gonna be the bitch, but summer has been hiding so maybe now it is gonna show up.
AlBarclay 