Iconoclasm, orgasms, and rampant rhetoric are all on irrepressible display in The Wooster Group’s recreation of the 1971 Manhattan debate that pitted Norman Mailer against some of the leading feminists of the day.
Oscar Wilde did not have a dignified departure. As soon as he died, his body began to emit a river of fluids from various orifices. At the graveside in Père Lachaise there were unseemly scenes which no witness was indiscreet enough to describe, but probably they involved theatrics from Bosie. Wilde, using Canon Chasuble as a mouthpiece, had once joked about choosing to be interred in Paris: “I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.”
Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince ponders that throwaway gag from a variety of angles. Despite his desperate plight, Everett’s Oscar is far from serious. In the brief years of his exile, we see him sing a bawdy gay song at the top of his voice in a French drinking den, dine with a rowdy coterie of Gallic poets (pictured below), and cavort with naked young Neapolitans in an all-male enactment of Salome. Anyone expecting this biopic to be an unremitting tale of misery and humiliation should prepare for a joyous surprise.
Wilde was released from Reading Gaol in 1897 and immediately fled across the Channel, where there was still no escape from Anglo-Saxon opprobrium. Near the start, a well-to-do woman (a cameo for Anna Chancellor) recognises him in a street in northern France but is forbidden from expressing sympathy by her husband. They both roared in the stalls before the playwright’s downfall, but the English have their standards. Oscar’s strength and saviour are Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) and Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) whose love and tolerance is unstinting. But they urge him to stick to the terms of his agreement with his wife Constance (Emily Watson): in order to keep receiving his allowance, he must avoid contact with Lord Alfred Douglas (Colin Morgan).
Bosie was the cause of all the trouble in the first place. An opening caption reminds us that Wilde’s legal travails were triggered when the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, Lord Alfred’s father, left a card for Wilde accusing him of “posing as a somdomite”. (For clarity, Everett corrects his Lordship’s typo.) Naturally they are unable to stay apart, and set up house in Naples where Vesuvius glowers symbolically on the horizon.
The Happy Prince is the long-cherished dream of Rupert Everett, who played Wilde in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, which is set on the night in 1895 when the playwright refused to do a midnight flit as law closed in. A sprightly Imagine documentary, Rupert Everett - Born to Be Wilde (available until 5 July on iPlayer), tells the story of the film’s long, agonising gestation. Was it worth rolling the rock up the hill?
Everett directs himself in his own script and somehow manages not to look overburdened by the immense responsibility. Much prettier than Oscar, he has elongated his jawline to mimic the long face, and the look can be a distraction. But he embraces Wilde’s headlong descent into isolation and penury with a reckless joie de vivre. “I’ve nothing in me, not even fear,” he says after facing down a pack of goading toffs. One awful scene, on the platform of Clapham Junction, embodies all of Wilde’s tragedy, but gives rise to a wonderful climactic joke.
His performance is richer and deeper than Stephen Fry’s, who starred in the last major biopic. Colin Morgan has a harder task erasing the memory of the young Jude Law, who was born to embody Bosie’s superficial beauty. In pretty blond tresses, he captures the shameless petulance, self-regard and cruelty of an angelic devil. Watson (pictured above) is dignified as Constance, racked with back pain and torn between love and rage. There’s a wry comic turn from Tom Wilkinson as an Irish padre, and a juicy one from Béatrice Dalle as a low-life chatelaine.
The eponymous ur-text provides Everett with the framework. In happier times he recites his heartrending fairytale to his two young sons as a bedtime story, and it comes to stand for the odyssey of Wilde himself. The other more overt accounts of his ordeal – De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol – are mentioned only in dispatches, while the script quotes liberally from Wilde’s bon mots. “'Like dear St Francis I am wedded to poverty,' he says at one point, 'but in my case the marriage is not a success.'”
Wilde’s quietus, peopled by bizarre hallucinations, is not quite as tear-jerking as the story of the statue and the sparrow. Nor, blessedly, is it as disgusting as the real death. Handsomely shot by John Conroy, this is a spirited and humane homage from an actor who knows and understands his subject inside out.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Happy Prince
Although once famous for her Australian drawl and hazy jams, on her most recent album Tell Me How You Really Feel, Courtney Barnett has transformed herself into an all-singing indie star, resulting in something more assured, vulnerable, and intense than her previous work. Touring the UK with her band of Bones Sloan, Dave Mudie and Katie Harkin, her 19-song set in Albert Hall in Manchester is faultless.
“He’s not a sideshow attraction,” we hear towards the end of Marc Meyers’s queasily compelling My Friend Dahmer, when one of the “Dahmer Fan Club”, a group of high school sham-friends-cum-taunters who have been treating the film’s teen protagonist as if he was just that, has second thoughts.
There was a time when Hugh Grant was viewed as a thespian one-trick pony, a floppy-haired fop dithering in a state of perpetual romantic confusion. But things have changed. He was excellent in Florence Foster Jenkins, hilariously self-parodic in Paddington 2, and he’s brilliant in A Very English Scandal (BBC One) as smooth, treacherous Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. At moments, he even manages to look uncannily like him.
A rope is mercy; a razor-blade to the throat, a kiss; a red-hot poker… But, of course, we never get anything so literal as the poker in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s elegant, insinuating retelling of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.
Director James Erskine found a fascinating subject in the life of ice-skating legend John Curry and has fashioned it into an absolutely compelling 90-minute documentary. Curry was only 45 when he died of AIDS in 1994, but his professional career, in which he moved from ice-skating as competitive sport to performing and choreographing it as dance, was intense: Erskine describes him, in the short Q&A that appears as an extra on this DVD release, as “an artist more than an athlete,” and you end up agreeing resoundingly.
The Ice King makes clear the struggles that Curry went through to reach his success. The film starts with his early triumphs in the competition world, from the Prague 1966 championships, through Davos 1970, to reach an early career culmination with his gold medal victory at the 1976 Innsbruck Winter Olympics. That triumph allowed him to launch his John Curry Theatre of Skating, as he put competition speed and flourish behind to mesmerise with a solo performance of “L'après-midi d'un faune” on the London stage, that still captivates today with all the expressive power of the greatest dancers, Nijinsky coming inevitably to mind.
There were demons, of course. Curry’s private life was complex, his childhood dominated by a father who had strict ideas about his son’s future: skating was acceptable because it was sport, the idea that John might become a dancer unthinkable. It was a distinction that continued even into his professional career, with one trainer instructing him “not to be so graceful”. Though he didn't exacty come out, his homosexuality became public at the time of his Olympic victory, setting precedent for competitive sport at the time.
Erskine makes good visual use of the letters that Curry wrote throughout his life, with the actor Freddie Fox providing voice-over: Fox brings just the right fey delight to the character. It’s accompanied by the testament of friends, from the Swiss skater Heinz Wirz, who met Curry at Prague 1966 and became one of his first lovers, through those with whom he became close as his sporting career developed (as New York became increasingly the place where he felt most at home), and on to the collaborators with whom he worked on his ever-more demanding shows.
Highlights, of course, include the 1984 Symphony on Ice at London’s Royal Albert Hall, followed by the John Curry Skating Company’s triumph at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with its collaborations with prominent contemporary choreographers. The shows may have won the highest critical plaudits, but we learnt how the technical demands of staging them in such venues made for a lot of anxiety. “Can I stop now?” Curry apparently asked after the Met premiere, but the international tours that followed demanded his presence, and proved punishing, not least when Curry raised artistic objections at their commercial trappings (intrusive signage was a particular hate). There were contradictions aplenty, no doubt caprice too, but the reverence accorded him by collaborators spoke for itself, even while the personal demons never left him, a sense of melancholy somehow deepening towards the end.
Some of the landmark performances survive only in amateur video recordings, which makes watching them a particularly moving experience. Live orchestra accompaniment was crucial for the shows’ impact, but the musical recordings were in even worse state, which sent Erksine and his musical director Stuart Hancock off to record a whole new soundtrack with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra (an eight-minute extra covers the experience). That location was fitting, given that Curry’s 1993 “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” was one of his final pieces, its male quartet a glorious reminder of how he broke new artistic ground, a creative pioneer in a medium virtually of his own creation.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Ice King
Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to become the groundbreaking Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1994. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005, he’s worked with collaborators as different as the National, Duckie, the Bristol Old Vic, Artangel, and the Edinburgh International Festival.
Four of his previous Brighton Festival shows have been at the Theatre Royal: his Oscar Wilde homage For Alfonso in 2011; his one-man show What Can You Do in 2012; The Britten Canticles with Ian Bostridge in 2013; and his play Stella in 2016. This year he is collaborating with performer Francois Testory and electronic sound-artist Phil Von to present Medea, Written In Rage (26th May), a tour-de-force solo reimagining of the classical legend .
“The Theatre Royal is one of my favourite venues in the country," he says “It's a real sleeping beauty of a building, and somewhere you can create a real rapport between the performer and the crowd. Medea is a pretty spectacular piece - big frock, big sound, big performance - but it's also very personal, very intense, and I think the stage of the Royal is going to be ideal"
A Brighton Festival regular, then, Neil's picks of this year are as follows (all dates are in May).
The Myth of Sisyphus (11th, Grand Central): “Camus is a writer we could all use to pay attention to right now - he's all about how to live in impossible times. And what a great idea this is. Simon is a terrific performer - so go for the day and really get stuck in.”
Yomi Sode’s Coat (10th-11th, Brighthelm Centre): “I cut my teeth making solo out of stories that nobody was hearing at the time, and I'm fascinated to see how a whole new generation is right now using solo performance to tell a whole new set of stories. Plus he's dishing up stew!”
Britten’s War Requiem (12th, Dome): “I love the way the festival is unafraid to let the great voices of the past ring out for new audiences. The Requiem is a masterpiece of political rage and yearning, in lots of unexpected ways. It’s going to make an amazing companion piece to Hofesh Schecter's Grand Finale. And I have to say that with those three soloists – blimey! - you're never going it hear it sung more beautifully or with more personal commitment.”
Joan (13th -14th, The Basement): “This was one of my favourite shows of last year when it toured - punchy, funny, in your face. Drag King Heaven.”
Ursula Martinez (14th, Old Market, FREE ADMISSION): “Takes solo lady-performance and really weaponises it. There are a lot of great queer voices in the festival this year, and I think Ursula might be the one who's going to be showing us all how it's done.”
Brownton Abbey (25th, Dome): “With that title, how can we go wrong? This looks like being the party that really brings this year's festival to the boil. Expect fabulousness.”
Ezra Furman (26th, Dome): “A major new voice, perfect for those who like their rock'n'roll really wrecked. And being one myself, I can never resist a man who wears pearls.”
Songs of the Sea (13th, Glyndebourne): “If you know these artists already, then you'll need no persuading; but if you think the classical music programme is maybe not for you, then this might be the show to change your mind. In particular, pianist Julius Drake can make a keyboard speak like nobody else does. In the perfect acoustic at Glyndebourne, his playing is going to be like being given a new pair of ears. Plus those standing seats are only £10.”
Nicola Barker and Nick Harkaway: Future Perfect (13th, Brighton & Hove High School): “When I'm not making theatre, I'm a novelist. My last one, The Disappearance Boy, was set in Brighton in 1953. These two writers are all about trying to find new ways of writing the right now and the just over the horizon. I reckon the conversation will be fascinating for anyone who's thinking ahead about how words actually work these days."
Overleaf: Neil Bartlett and Francois Testory talk about Medea: Written In Rage
Simon Napier-Bell’s film has a huge appetite for its subject, which is, of course, the half-century of gay history in Britain that followed the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality brought by the Wolfenden Report in 1967. 50 Years Legal barely slows for a moment over its 90-minute run, concentrating on the wealth of personal testimony of some four dozen interviewees, drawn predominantly from the worlds of entertainment and the arts, its perspective completed by a small rank of politicians and public figures.
Everyone was involved – in different ways, at different times – in the history that they talk about, their experiences coloured by a huge range of emotions, from anger, both raw and considered, to humour. 50 Years Legal was first broadcast on Sky Arts in July 2017 (there is an accompanying book) as part of last year’s generous range of offerings marking the anniversary. Another was Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City, a wider history of gay London over two millennia, that devoted some 50 pages to the period that Napier-Bell covers in his film, but somehow managed to present it as almost dry-as-dust history. To say that 50 Years Legal gives us a sense of history as a living entity would be a massive understatement, and its testimony is incisively backed up by the director's choice of archive material, including plenty of treats.
It’s presented in a rapid-fire edit (full kudos to editor Joshua Hughes for bringing the whole structure together), with contributions delivered in bites of a sentence or two, themes recurring over a narrative that Napier-Bell divides into five loose chapters, each of a decade. The effect is somehow cyclical – not unlike the film's visual interludes, gymnastic hoop gyrations from Matthew Richardson Circus Art – which makes it as difficult to single out any one episode as it would be egregious to choose from any of the contributors (though it should remind us just how considerable is the debt that Britain's gay community owes to Peter Tatchell). It's a collective company, as the DVD cover indicates (pictured right), in which men very much dominate, though women and trans people do feature more as the years move on.
There’s occasionally a sense of being bombarded with information and feeling, the result no doubt of Napier-Bell having filmed so much more material than the film's length could accomodate. But the director closes with a much longer excerpt from the remarkable speech that Ian McKellen gave at the Oxford Union in 2015 (main picture), its lapidary power all the more striking for the contrast with what has come before. It also reminds us, hauntingly, that for all the achievements and advances of a remarkable half-century, one that has changed British society beyond recognition, the struggle against prejudice is never going to go away.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for 50 Years Legal & Ian McKellen's speech at the Oxford Union, in full
The title of South African director John Trengove’s powerful first feature works in more ways than one. In its literal sense, it alludes to the ritual circumcision, or ukwaluka, that accompanies the traditional rite of passage for young Xhosa men, and the process of healing that follows. It’s a process that sees teenage “initiates” symbolically inducted into adulthood by older men, or “care-givers”, who have themselves previously been through the experience that they now oversee.
Traditionally shrouded in secrecy, descriptions of ukwaluka are rare, the best-known that in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, where it was presented in a positive light. That hasn’t always been matched in other contemporary accounts, which have recorded darker aspects to the experience, reflecting as it inevitably does on wider issues of masculinity in society. That Trengove, a white director who is by definition far removed from his subject, approached the subject at all proved controversial in his home territory, though his co-writers include novelist Thando Mgqolozana (who treated it in his 2009 A Man Who Is Not a Man).
Director John Trengove’s insight is so much more than anthropological
The Wound adds an extra dimension to this traditional story, with Trengove centring the human dimension of his film on three characters. It opens with Xolani (Nakhane Touré) at his warehouse job in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape province: we sense the contrast between the dull routine of this everyday working life and the retreat to which he travels in a mountainous, virtually subsistence world, and how it revives him, not least for the fact that he encounters friends from the past there.
It becomes clear that the bonds linking him to his childhood friend, now fellow care-giver, Vija (Bongile Mantsai), are far closer than they appear, giving the story an overtly queer accent – except Vija, who is married and has children, seems to treat his friend as little more than a casual sexual contact, while Xolani attaches greater significance to the time they spend together. There’s a quiet sadness in Xolani, a sense that the society in which he lives precludes him creating a role for himself that might accommodate his true character. Vija represses whatever feelings he may have for his friend, whom his own self-identity concerns prohibits from treating differently, except at rare moments (pictured below). It’s another sort of wound, one inherent in a world where this kind of love cannot be reconciled in any other way.
If that sounds like the scenario for a South African Brokeback Mountain, the film’s third character, Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini, pictured below, in background, with Nakhane Touré), disrupts such a dynamic. He comes from a wealthy family in distant Johannesburg, a city boy brought here by his father for the toughening up that the ukwaluka promises. It's not only his trainers that set Kwanda's urban modernity apart from his fellow initiates: Xolani, who has one-on-one responsibility for the youth, easily guesses that he’s different from them in his sexual orientation, too. Kwanda stands at one remove, allowing him a degree of scepticism about the proceedings of the ukwaluka rite (in which respect he surely shares something with Trengove as outsider-director), as well as an insight into what’s going on between the two older men. The Wound draws us into this increasingly uneasy three-sided configuration, one which festers – unlike the physical wound of circumcision, which heals – with dramatic inexorability.
But such a bare outline does little to convey the subtlety of Trengove’s film. The director is so receptive to the power of images and intonations over words, and his spare style comes close to that of Dogma in its fluid, frequently handheld camerawork (barring a couple of slow-motion sequences) and a rigorous avoidance of external effects (musical incursions are minimal). 
There may be big landscapes aplenty in the surroundings, but Paul Özgür’s widescreen cinematography is memorable for its intimacy. Visual elements of Xhosa tradition – the contrasted colours of the initiates’ loincloths, their white body paint (main picture) – aren’t exaggerated, but the film engrosses us in its (for the great majority of its viewers, anyway) unfamiliar world. You guess that making the film must have been a broadly collaborative process, and Trengove’s insight is so much more than merely anthropological (though The Wound certainly feels true on that level, too). Most of all, he has drawn performances from his main trio that may seem at first understated, but in which his characters come to inhabit their roles absolutely. Pared down almost to silence by the end, Nakhane Touré as Xolani proves emphatically that less can be more. You could say exactly the same about the film as a whole: The Wound impresses for its raw, incremental power.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Wound