a bit of bonhomie

Earlier today, at the enjoyable seminar organized by the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival at Trinity College, Irish Gay Theatre Past and Present, I heard artistic director, Brian Merriman, speak of his passion about the event, and how he believed in the importance of portraying the truth of gay people’s lives in theatre. Much was rightly made of the success of the festival’s first week, especially that all of the previous night’s shows were sold out, on Eurovision night.I heard that, to date, no representative of the Arts Council has yet deigned to attend the festival, since its inception in 2004. The entire budget of the 2006 festival, with 20 shows, was €27,000, including the cost of putting up the touring productions, which is an amazingly small amount of money – not so much a shoestring, but a piece of thread. It survives and thrives by virtue of the amazing degree of community support it attracts, with over fifty volunteers happy to give their time to ensure its smooth running. It is currently the biggest, if not the only, gay theatre festival in the world, with over thirty-five productions in the 2007 programme – and I find it shocking that the Arts Council has not, at the very least, come to see how it’s done. If budgets are tight, it doesn’t cost anything to encourage, to praise, and their complete lack of interest makes me wonder if homophobia is at work, and I’m not usually one to point that particular finger.

I enjoyed the afternoon, even though much of the material about Oscar Wilde and Micheál MacLiammóir I knew already, having been a puffta thespian who has read practically everything that has been written about both men. It was interesting to hear from UCC’s Dr Eibhear Walshe just how safe MacLiammóir felt he had to play it in the 1960s, when doing his one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar; but it was precisely his caution that ensured the rehabilitation of Wilde’s reputation. I was greatly taken with UCD’s Dr Katherine O’Donnell’s presentation on the topic of Camp, which was highly entertaining and thought-provoking. Quoting Susan Sontag, Katherine said, “to talk about camp is to betray it”, saying that it’s a bit like trying to explain a joke – you either get camp or you don’t. I was struck by her notion that camp is a triumph of style over substance – but that the same could be said of gender itself. At the end of her presentation I was left wanting more. From the audience, there was a telling point that the amazing plays of Frank McGuinness from the eighties and nineties with gay themes, most especially in my view Carthaginians and Innocence, haven’t been revived since. They are much too good to be forgotten.