PANTI’S RIOT AT LUMINATO
Ireland’s most famous drag queen brings a bit of circus and cabaret to festival,
Panti, Ireland’s best-known drag performer, has come to Luminato and she’s brought along a riot.
Actually, that’s RIOT, in all caps, a production by the Dublin-based thisispopbaby theatre company, a show that’s a joyously eclectic blend of circus, poetry, song, dance and cabaret.
The show was commissioned and developed in 2016 to celebrate the centennial of the Easter Rising, which led to the creation of the Republic of Ireland six years later.
So the show, in the words of Panti a.k.a. Rory O’Neill, is about revolutionary change — of the positive sort.
“The theme of the show is obviously about revolution and changing the world. (It’s) optimistic. It says a single person can effect change and many people together can effect great change. It’s written as an Irish story but it turns out it’s universal,” O’Neill said in an recent interview.
Universal enough that, after debuting as the main event at the Dublin Fringe Festival two years ago, it’s been remounted and has gone on the road and abroad to New York, Australia and to Luminato, where it plays at the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre until June 16, with more international dates in the offing.
RIOT is rather a departure for Panti, who’s more used to being a “one-woman show,” but Jennifer Jennings and Phillip McMahon — the two main creative forces behind the company — have been producing O’Neill’s shows for 12 years and persuaded Panti to be part of it.
“I came up through the nightclub scene working with millions of other drag queens and all that. Basically this is a cast of drag queens — though they’re not maybe doing drag — but they’re all theatrical types. (Jennings and McMahon) gathered all the fun people that they’ve worked with over the years that they’d like to see in one show together,” Panti said, with a laugh.
Panti is sort of the troupe’s elder statesperson, having begun performing in the 1980s.
“I sort of fell into club performing, not strictly drag in the beginning. And I just kept doing it because it was fun and then people started paying me to do little bits of it and next thing I knew, I was a professional drag performer,” O’Neill said.
“And somewhere along the way, I realized I have no other skills, I don’t know how to do anything else so I’ve been doing it ever since.”
O’Neill grew up in a small western Irish town in a stereotypical Irish-Catholic family with six other siblings.
“My parents have always been very thinking people, they’re not sort of blind old-school Catholics or at least they’re aren’t now. They took it in their stride really and they’re very proud of me now,” O’Neill said.
Panti noted that Ireland itself is an example that positive change is possible, with a national referendum in 2015 that approved a constitutional amendment in favour of same-sex marriage and most recently an overwhelming vote to end restrictions on abortion there. The reason? The gays. “Ireland is a very small country and in some ways very tied to tradition. But in other ways, that smallness allows it to change very quickly. Gay people are a very good example. As soon as people starting coming out in the 1970s and 1980s, it really changed Ireland because in Ireland, it’s impossible not to know a few gays. You either live next door to some gays or it’s someone is teaching your kids or cutting your hair,” O’Neill said.
“Whereas in a big country, it’s very possible to live and not really have any interaction with real live actual gay people. And that is just not possible in Ireland. It turns out the vast majority of Irish people are absolutely fine with the gays.”