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I haven’t seen a show by Pan Pan Theatre Company before. I am, I realise now, much the poorer for it.  My recent doubts about the state of Irish theatre, its lack of edge and intelligence, are completely dispelled after seeing Oedipus Loves You at the Project.

There is one week left to see them in this production, before they hit the road again and continue their seemingly unceasing well-deserved tours around the world, with other shows. This production, however, has toured to more than 20 cities, including Berlin, Beijing, Helsinki, London, Quebec, New York and Shanghai. Please, please, please, go here now and book your tickets to see what the rest of the world has enjoyed. You will be rewarded with a scintillating assault on the senses, a  hilarious piss-take of the Oedipus complex, barbecues, Freud, mythology, dysfunctional families and therapy games, in an exhilarating 90-minute roller-coaster ride. And there’s music too. And nakedness. And sausages. For more information, here’s an interview with the writer/director/founder Gavin Quinn.

This is my kind of theatre. It is the sort of work I was involved in as an actor during the eighties, one of the Tom McIntyre “lunatics in the basement”, in the Peacock Theatre. Since coming back to Ireland two years ago I’ve been wondering if we were just a flash in the pan in Ireland, whether the literary tradition had washed away all traces of our nonsense. Physical, movement-orientated theatre, influenced by dance companies such as Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, and the mime of Marceau; theatre of the absurd; subversive mucking around with myths and fairytales, symbols and archetypes, poetry and soundbytes; multimedia (I have fond memories of the late, lamented and demented Joan O’Hara with braces and a Nurse Ratchett cap on a loop on a TV, centre stage, advocating smiling therapy, repeating the words “Happy Brain Chemicals” over and over again).

In general, it was a sort of inspired lunacy, the edge of madness/genius. Of the playwrights who lit up that decade, as far as I was concerned, Marina Carr has continued to furrow her intense and prolific path with integrity and passion, (more to come with Marble) and I am delighted to see Tom McIntyre coming back with Only An Apple next year. But until I saw Pan Pan, I wasn’t sure who were the next generation of lunatics. And I mean that as the highest compliment I can muster.

McIntyre in the eighties deliberately set out to avoid declarative text, swimming against the strong tide of the Irish literary tradition. His intention was not to frustrate communication, but to communicate on a much deeper level with audiences. He aimed to connect on an archetypal, visual, haunting and often playful wavelength with the audience – the stuff of dreams, of nightmares. Once the audience stopped trying to understand the work literally, and went with the flow, as it were, the experience was consuming, overwhelming.  And, sometimes, this meant that people got angry, people were confused and irritated at what they saw was pretension. But for those who got what we were about, it was stunning.

Some experimental theatre companies test the boundaries by challenging the expectations of audiences, consciously risking and/or inviting disappointment, outrage, disgust, boredom, and the experience is sometimes akin to a rather unpleasant assault. Some have a simmering contempt for their audiences, their imagination or values, and the audience feels fucked and used like an object, a thing, leaving one emotionless, cold, ashamed for having consented, or experienced pleasure.

And then there’s Pan Pan, who, with zest and passion, have the sort of playful sex with the audience that is full of belly-laughs; this is making love with a whole-hearted, mirthful, conscious presence. It’s intelligent without being pretentious, it’s risk-taking without being deliberately obscure.  They want to take you on their journey, to be moved, to have fun, to be challenged, to be tickled, to be dazzled.

DC and Marvel superheroes and supervillains face extinction. The Anarchic Invincibility Deficiency Syndrome unmasks masked idols and Supermen fade to grey. When the world falls darker than Joker’s soul, something sharper than Wolverine’s claws will save us. Heroic Couplets, comic book duality and a touch of La Ronde from award-winning writer Neil Watkins.

This blurb is deliberately, perversely deceptive. There are no superheroes here, Batman is nowhere to be seen. However, at one stage, at the edge of my seat, mouth open, I was thinking of writing my first one-line rave review on this blog: “Go see this fucking show”. But then, I thought, “don’t get high on this intoxicating atmosphere, wait until I connect, I’m moved, until I get the story, until it all makes some sort of meaningful sense”.

It didn’t. Like an exciting trick from Gaydar, it seemed, in the poppers-rushed moment, to be an important and intense experience; but, the morning after, the room smelling of stale socks, head throbbing, tongue like sandpaper, I am wondering what on Earth possessed me.

It is still, however, required viewing for anyone interested in modern queer Irish sensibility – for playwright Neil Watkins turns out to be the man behind the drag act called Heidi Konnt, who apparently won Alternative Miss Ireland in 2005, the year before I returned to Ireland. It’s edgy, sexual, and perverse enough to set up nervous laughter in some segments of the audience, (no doubt those expecting men in Superman costumes doing something silly). Part burlesque, part Cabaret, part Hedwig, it’s morbid and desolate and disconsolate and seductive, and yet somehow strangely insubstantial for all that. Curiouser and curiouser.

Love 2.0

The first, Two Houses by Belinda McKeon, unusually, and fascinatingly, is a two-hander between a 30-year-old brother, Eamon (Brendan McCormack) rolling in from the pub late at night, and his 16-year-old sister (Jenn Murray) having internet chats on Bebo, and it is at once a glimpse of a teenage girl’s awakening to the realities of life as it is an American Beauty-like exposition of a man’s folly.

The second piece, Investment Potential by Philip McMahon, gripped me. It wasn’t so much in the story, which was deftly and intriguingly told, but in the character of Anne, played with depth by Kathy Kiera Clarke. Sometimes good writing is not just about telling a story, it’s about breathing life into a fascinating original character. She is sunk in a depression that is all too real; a deadness inside, a stultifying anhedonia, a heart that needs healing; and yet she purrs with a deadpan humour. Three scenes, told in a disjointed chronology, map out her romantic relationship with bookstore manager Brendan (McCormack again, winningly versatile). There’s more to Anne’s story than this play can tell, and I’d love to see it.

In particular, I want to pay tribute to the way the cast mastered the language, the patois of Capetown and the island of Tristan de Cunha. I went to the show not knowing a thing about it, a friend invited me; I thought initially that I was watching a visiting South African touring production, until I recognized Enda Oates. This modest little Irish company is playing a blinder. They make a demanding, idiosyncratic text effortless to listen to, so the full drama of the story sinks in.

It is right and fitting that he should be invited to direct Wilde at the Abbey, and An Ideal Husband is an intriguing choice. It’s not Wilde’s best work, but nevertheless it still makes for an entertaining evening.

The first act, a party set at the home of the Chilterns, was a delight – we entered a superbly staged world of a decadent society, the women resplendent in high fashion, the players displaying almost a Commedia dell’Arte physicality, jousting in a heightened Berkoff-esque wordplay that seemed faultless.

However, the darker themes of the play soon become apparent: blackmail, insider dealing, political hypocrisy, honour and character, love and betrayal, redemption and forgiveness. They are too personal for lightweight comedy; or, perhaps, Wilde’s unhappy end reminds us that they are, in truth, no laughing matter. As a result, the flippancy and sparkling irreverence of the play’s opening act is hard to follow.

The set-up is for Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising star of the political firmament, to fall, brought down by the scheming Mrs Cheveley, who can prove his entire career and wealth was based on selling a government secret.

Derbhle Crotty is outstanding as the blackmailer, seductive, sinister and passionately self-serving. Lord Goring, an old lover of hers and a friend of the Chilterns, is, on the surface, a determined, frivolous dandy. He proves to be a man of real substance and character when tested, and becomes a formidable match for Mrs Cheveley, and a reliable friend in need, the catalyst to enable the Chilterns to forgive each other their human weaknesses, and move on.

Lord Goring: All I know, Gertrude, is that it takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love.

Mark O’Halloran is as perfect a Lord Goring as one could imagine. He brings a sense of being a “wise old soul” to the part, as well as impeccable comic timing, and at times he reminded me of one of my favourite English actors, Leonard Rossiter.

The costumes were sumptuous, and the lighting in particular was excellent (by Chris Davey). I was confused by one aspect of the production, however: the set. Although set and costumes were both the work of the same person, Bartlett’s long-time collaborator Rae Smith, they did not feel like they were in the same production at all. There was no expense spared in the costumes; they were stunning in every detail. The set, however, looked like it would be serviceable enough in a fit-up company in the fifties, on a regional tour; painted plywood boards everywhere, a sort of designer shabbiness, with a post-modern self-consciousness; we see behind the sets to the bare walls and doors, we see the braces and stage-weights, the chandelier has an ugly electric plug showing half way up the chain. The red velvet curtain that falls between acts is bedraggled and torn, but only covers half the wide Abbey stage. I could easily imagine this production working very well in a severe black box, with no pretence at period detail; on the other hand, a decent attempt at a subdued but quality set that allowed the actors to shine would have done no harm at all. But this was neither fish nor fowl, and was distracting to me. Perhaps I expect more from the National Theatre; yet I am usually more than happy to support a production that confounds a certain bourgeois expectation that classic period plays should have gorgeous sets. The sets should never be the point in Wilde; perhaps I am just old-school enough to believe they shouldn’t attract my attention at all.

However, this production is well worth a visit; well-paced, witty, snappy, and passionate. I’ve rarely heard such uniformly crisp, crystalline English accents on an Irish stage, and even though I saw the show in preview, the ensemble acting was as tight as a drum. The dialogue between Sir Robert and his wife, when they are torn apart by the prospect of ruin, is as relevant now as it was then; the corrosive effects of idealization in a marriage, indeed any relationship, and what happens when someone falls off the pedestal on which their partner has placed them. But I was curiously unmoved, as their love was tested; perhaps it’s because in the cynical 21st Century, it’s hard to accept undiluted moral outrage that a politician has a guilty secret. Neither of the Chilterns is easy to warm to, but I don’t believe that is the fault of the actors. Perhaps, in their exchanges, Wilde was safely playing out the many conversations, imagined and real, he had with his loyal wife, Constance, over his own secret life, which would have been incendiary and heartrending. Had the real issues of Wilde’s marriage been addressed in this play, it would have been electrifying. But of course that would have been impossible at the time, so in a sense we are reading between the lines.

Wilde was being blackmailed himself, at the time he wrote this play. The storm clouds were gathering, and he was arrested for gross indecency during its first run. By sailing so close to the wind in his emotional subject matter, but distancing himself from the real matter in hand, perhaps he lost perspective. It is purportedly a comedy, in that it plays around with appearances, illusions and reality, but, at its heart, it is a neutered tragedy. Perhaps a sense of superstition prevented him from cataloguing his hero’s downfall. Maybe he was refusing to tempt fate by presaging his own destruction. Life imitates art; perhaps he believed, or hoped against hope, that by creating a story with a happy ending he could avert the inevitable, and keep the circling wolves from his door. As Wilde would have been very well aware, wishful thinking, as played out in the eventual happy resolution of An Ideal Husband, is antithetical to great art. That Chiltern doesn’t fall, that his corruption does not get exposed, is a happy ending of sorts; but his last words are insecure, self-doubting. It is neither a comic nor tragic story. It is human, but not as dramatic as real life.

The tense exchanges between former lovers Lord Goring and Mrs Cheveley are richly satisfying; and there are elements of pure farce in the final scenes which are timed to perfection. Goring, happily, finds his playmate in the end, in the chirpy Mabel Chiltern, (played delightfully by Aoibheann O’Hara), and they all, seemingly, live happily ever after; a bittersweet backdrop to the real tragedy that befell Wilde, which he must have known was coming. I would give anything to have been in the audience watching this play in 1895, the night the news had been broken that the playwright had been arrested.

All in all, an interesting play played with relish by an excellent cast; like a beautifully accomplished portrait of an imperfect subject, showing its best qualities. Pity about the cheap frame.

Romeo and Juliet pitched at the bebo generation is a risky proposition. Ever since Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film for the e generation, theatrical productions which aim to give this teen tragedy a contemporary feel, and reach new, younger audiences, have a hard act to follow. But, given the power of this play, it should survive most attempts to give it a make-over, if the text is respected, and the actors aren’t daunted by the language. Too often in Irish theatre, Shakespeare productions suffer because of a clumsiness or self-consciousness with the verse, that interferes with the fluidity of the story-telling.

Happily, in this production by Jason Byrne, (the first time the Abbey has ever staged this play), the actors are, in the main, in effortless command of the narrative. In particular, the stellar Gemma Reeves brought a moving simplicity and heartache to the role of Juliet, in a way that caught me by the throat. Her mother, Anita Reeves, playing the nurse, was also powerfully affecting, funny and human. As for Romeo, Aaron Monaghan helped make the famous balcony scene with Juliet one of the most gripping I’ve ever seen – risky, funny, and full of the adrenaline-rush of adolescent infatuation. I’m not sure, however, that his leggy laddy physicality was quite right for Romeo. But then, that part is one of the most difficult parts to play in Shakespeare (I know, I’ve played it) because there’s a spinelessness, a haplessness to his personality, as evidenced when he changes his mooning affections from Rosaline to Juliet in a conscienceless flash. In his scenes with the Friar Laurence, his immaturity and sheer gormlessness become apparent, almost to an irritating degree. Frank McCusker, as the friar, gave the most satisfying performance of all for me, in a way, because it was so surprisingly menacing, worldly and dark.

The dance sequence, in which Romeo catches first sight of Juliet, was just a bit too rich and self-consciously contemporary for me stylistically, with Amy Winehouse providing the backing track. But I loved the overall look of the piece – the design ideas that influenced designer Jon Bausor are available to look at on the show’s bebo page – and the stunningly stormy set piece at the end of Act I, with superb lighting by Paul Keogan, was filmic and exciting.

The naturalness of the speaking style in this production extended to allowing actors to use their own accents, which worked largely successfully, but contributed to a disjointed loss of place at times. And I felt a little bit uneasy at a couple of the scenes where there is a collective weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over yet another death; sometimes, grief restrained is more affecting.

However, it’s Juliet who carries the play, and Gemma Reeves’ truly harrowing distress at the end left me wet-faced and shaken, as if I’d never seen this timeless tragedy before. And that, for me, is the mark a truly contemporary production; Amy Winehouse, and all that jazz, is but icing on the cake.

The answer, with a few reservations, is a definite yes. Most especially, the dramatic chemistry between the suave, proud and cultured valet, Jean (Declan Conlon), and the reckless “wild child” daughter of the estate, Miss Julie (Catherine Walker), is something I won’t forget in a hurry. In this version by Frank McGuinness, the dynamics between them, as performed by these two subtle and well-matched players, are sexualized in a very contemporary way. The power struggle is not predictable, however; there is a volatile edgy switching of control and status between them, a sophisticated sex play bordering on sadomasochism, that is at times blatant and scintillating, and sometimes disturbing and poignant. And yet, the two never stray too far away from the emotional reality: Miss Julie’s life is ruined; she is the author of her own downfall, and as she careers desperately from envisioning one possible future to another, with or without the support of the ambiguous (and sometimes cruel) Jean, it becomes obvious that she is losing her mind.

So electric, modern, and accessible is the relationship between these two, that it enables us to see clearly the values and cultural norms of the era, and the differences between then and now become strikingly clear. In particular, the characters lack a certain psychological insight into their situation, which is not surprising, considering Freud had not yet begun publishing his work at the time. And yet Strindberg, with his references to hypnotism in the play, was champing at the bit to understand consciousness, and what we would understand now to be neurosis. He raises all sorts of questions about receptiveness to mind control, free will, identity and consent. He also writes of the fear that feminism posed to the social order, and, in one reading of the play it could be argued that Miss Julie’s sorry plight is a cautionary tale against feminism. Her end may be less shocking (and therefore less dramatically satisfying) than Hedda Gabler’s was to prove to be, a few years later, but it is nonetheless an intriguing one.

For the characters in Miss Julie, the class system underpins their sense of identity as rigidly as skeletons hold flesh together. The experience of Miss Julie’s fall from societal grace is akin to breaking one’s neck; it’s not something from which she can ever properly recover, unless she steals money and leaves everything she knows and starts a new life elsewhere, or kills herself.

We do not have such stark choices, such moral absolutes, in the twenty-first century, and so, at one level, this play has “dated”. And so, I would have preferred the third element of the love triangle, Juan’s “intended”, Kristin, the working-class cook, to be a little less the caricature of the prim, stiff-backed, overworked conservative servant, and whether that is in the writing or in the performance I saw in preview, by Mary Murray, I am not so sure. McGuinness actually has her say the punchline to the classic Barker/Cleese/Corbett sketch on the class system, “I know my place”, and as it is delivered humourlessly in this production, I wonder if something has gone a little awry.

I am also curious why Landmark Productions would need a “once-off” Arts Council grant to produce this show, seeing as it is essentially a three-hander. The nice set by Joe Vanek is functional and intelligent, but it doesn’t really add much to the production – the carousing extras who come on for one short scene are lively and well choreographed, but as they are probably acting students doing it for “experience”, (ie peanuts), it would hardly break the bank to have them on. Why would a play such as this require public funding? It is well directed by Michael Barker-Caven, and is a sexy and thought-provoking, slightly uneven but nonetheless intelligent production of a classic. That’s good enough for me.

The Man Who Kneels tells us, as The Standing Man is pointing a gun-shaped finger at him, that he’s really an actor, and how actors spend all their time saving their experiences for use later. “It’s not a real way to live”, he says, in a camp accent, more Fire Island Pines than Lonesome Pine. But, he declares with intensity, “I feel”. Before long, he’s dead, shot by The Standing Man, and he lies on the stage for most of the rest of the evening, relatively still.

As the piece progresses, with vignettes of varying lengths offering us glimpses of lives and themes that are resonant with the Western genre: drought, violence, lawlessness, cruelty, it becomes obvious there is no narrative. There are songs interspersed between the segments, melancholy and downbeat. One number, Endure, (recorded at the New York run), is below. A conversation between a couple is interrupted by the woman breaking away and telling the audience “There is a moment when the couple appear to be making love”. One man threatens another with obscene acts that belong more in a 21st Century S&M chatroom than the Wild West. The Standing Man then kills the other male member of the cast, who then, as a corpse, obligingly shuffles over to the side of the stage. The actors speak lines such as “I am not sure I am who I say I am”. Someone puzzles about the difference between seeing in colour or black and white.

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I try to find a way of connecting with what I’m seeing and hearing. Is this performance art? I imagine multimedia installations, large photographs (such as those by Maud Larsson) with lines of monologue or dialogue looped as a soundtrack for each one, as we take in each “character”’s story. I imagine a similar effect could be achieved with the actors in crackly, jerky, hand-cranked sepia video sequences, and a gallery full of screens, playing different scenes in random or synchronised order, with the music hauntingly wafting in and out of our awareness. The point of my imaginings is to highlight the fact that I don’t think this piece worked as theatre. I saw an effort to evoke an atmosphere, a spirit, a mood, which was most successfully achieved when there was music. I knew I was being challenged, which is no bad thing – but to what purpose?

I experienced an initial frisson of interest when The Man Who Kneels started talking “out of the box” as an actor, and I wondered if the piece was going to be about the nature of performance itself, a meta-narrative on the actor’s craft, or a post-modern take on the Western genre. Or, indeed, an unusual perspective on modern consciousness, seen through the metaphoric lens of an old wooden box camera.

It turned out to be, I’m afraid, none of these things. At the post-show discussion on Wednesday, Maxwell revealed himself to be someone taking great pleasure in confounding the expectations of audiences, as if that was a novel and/or original thing to do in itself. He seems to have an inordinate reverence for his actors, indulging them in their search for the “energy” of each moment, without paying attention to whether or not such endeavours interest the audience, or whether putting those “isolating seconds” all together makes emotional, intellectual or even intuitive sense, or is moving, disturbing or stimulating in any way.

The piece was workshopped with the actors (at the start of rehearsals there was no script). Maxwell supplied the concept for each segment, trusting that the actors would come up with their own truth in each one. One actor spoke of the challenge of playing in the piece, saying it was more like heightened film acting, there being no arc of performance from beginning to end in the piece. Having been a performer myself in shows constructed in a similar way, in experimental theatre in the 1980s, I know first-hand what the pitfalls are. The first one is one of the reasons I am no longer an actor: I was very good at emoting – but less good at evoking emotion in an audience. I could be consumed with real, live, turbulent feeling on stage, quivering with it, gasping with it, sobbing with it – but knowing that I had reached the core of my emotional “truth” was not enough – it was not necessarily something that was going to make the audience feel anything at all. Some actors have the knack, some don’t. Of course, without a good script, it really doesn’t matter how gifted the actor is. I’m afraid I saw rather too many actors in Ode To The Man Who Kneels who reminded me of my own acting flaw, displaying a fondness for exalting in a solipsistic “method” process, at the expense of communication, and I found it embarrassing.

The other pitfall of this kind of work is that, if one is deliberately confounding expectations and eschewing traditional means of engaging or “resonating” with an audience, the work had better display evidence of something more substantial than mere cleverness. The message should be powerful, the words insightful, the visuals striking, the moods distinctive. Bafflingly, there is a credit for dramaturgy in the programme; I cannot see how this script would have passed such scrutiny.

When Maxwell spoke of how he was more interested in talking to his actors in rhythmic terms rather than psychological terms, I then realised why I was so bored. Good drama is psychology. He said that, in Europe, audiences seemed more preoccupied with the Western form, whereas in the US, where the form is domestic, historic, unremarkable, audiences seemed more engaged with the content. But I cannot see how, even if I was deeply familiar with the Western genre and discourse, I would find the patchy, discordant and indulgent sequences in this play interesting.

A certain amount of leeway should be granted to all productions that push out the envelope. A degree of willingness to go out on a limb, and be taken somewhere strange and unfamiliar should be in every serious theatre-goer’s makeup. But, just as importantly, one should know when to point out when the emperor has no clothes.

You see, I’m not talking a one-night stand here. I’m committed. This is serious.

At a packed Olympia Theatre, Camille came on, louchely announced she was exhausted, lay on the floor, and had everyone immediately eating out of the palm of her hand. She’s astonishingly commanding on stage, playful and seductive, with a ballsiness that is amazingly beguiling. Watching her take off and put on her shoes, or putting on her make-up – she transforms it into an experience akin to performance art.

She’s an incredibly versatile performer, with not just the classic Brel and Brecht to satisfy our appetites, that rich material I’ve seen her perform in La Clique before. Ne Me Quitte Pas was simply beautiful. She sings everything from Dilly Keane’s Look Mummy, No Hands to Kirsty McColl’s In These Shoes? and a wonderfully bawdy version of Nina Simone’s Sugar in my Bowl – but she is a truly peerless interpreter of Bowie. Suffragette City and Rock’n'Roll Suicide simply rocked. Her band is superb.

She does dark so well – Nick Cave’s People Ain’t No Good was mesmeric, as was Tom Waits’ Misery is a River of the World, Everybody Row; then she shifted into Bowie’s Five Years which had me weeping as if I’d never heard it before, segueing into a goose-bump-raising Dark Side of the Moon.

She’s a really brave performer – she warped Mac the Knife tonally until she bent it into submission, triumphantly. Vocally, she strips herself bare, and flies high without a safety net; at the beginning of her first encore, Jacques Brel’s Marieke, dedicated to her Irish father and (blessedly) French mother, who were present, she inhabits a scary tone-shifting vulnerable breathy place, until she digs right down to produce the passion to transform it into an astonishing cri de couer.

She is such a compelling live performer because, although I’m listening to her newly-bought albums now, she takes risks each time she performs, and I can quite see myself wanting to see her every show in Dublin from now on – if only to see how far out on a limb she’s going to throw herself each time. And there’s something really joyous about her – if there’s one performer who signifies for me a vital and sparkling difference between the Ireland I left in 1993, and modern Ireland of 2007, it’s Camille O’Sullivan.

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Panti is back at the Project until Saturday and I urge you to go see this show if you possibly can. Book here now.

This is not the sort of show one would expect from a drag artist – or, perhaps, if one only associates drag artists with camp bints of nonsense. However, in exactly the same way that Dolly Parton spends a fortune to look so cheap, the camp persona of Panti, that has been constructed so cleverly, consciously, and artfully, reveals an enormous amount about Rory O’Neill, her creator, in this intense and intimate performance. By the end of the show something powerful happens, and an emotional vulnerability and openness becomes vividly apparent. It is done so subtly, with such charm and wit, it takes my breath away recalling it.

Panti’s every gesture and move is studied, statuesque, and she is as disciplined as a Marceau mime artist. Panti makes the point that lip-syncing is not as simple as it might appear – and by inviting attention to her craft it then becomes obvious that Panti has made it an art-form. She has a unique style that is incredibly precise, but slightly surreal – lips that are elastic, almost cartoonish, nudging naturalism out of the way and flirting with the slightly grotesque in a post-modern sense, that makes it constantly obvious she’s not really singing, but nonetheless it is utterly compelling and dramatic. This promo for the show on youtube is perfection – and yet it exposes only the elegance of Panti. There is serious, brave material in this show – thought-provoking questions on gender and men and sex and sexuality, on the plight of being a tranny and not really enjoying tranny-chasers, on finding gay men attractive but realising that gay men tend not to go for trannies. The loneliness of that, the gentleness behind that.
It takes balls to be this honest. It takes a lot of talent, however, to make such honesty funny and stylish. Don’t miss this show.