Panti’s new take on drag is camp but subtle
Irish performer’s confessional, witty spin on an old art form
If you haven’t heard of Panti, then the chances are you weren’t paying attention during the Irish referendum on gay marriage when her alter ego, performer Rory O’Neill, ended up playing a pivotal role in convincing the country to support the measure. Suddenly, in talking about his own experiences of homophobia, Ireland’s most famous drag queen was part provocateur, part national treasure.
O’Neill’s show, which is part of Take Me Somewhere at the Tramway, takes the Irish furore over gay marriage as the starting point, but it quickly ranges into other areas and manages the tricky job of balancing high campery, personal revelation, serious politics and, at some points, even melancholia – for instance, he talks about a young man from his townbackinIrelandwho committed suicide because he was unable to come to terms with being gay.
However, it is the personal revelations that provide some of the best moments of the show. O’Neill talks about being diagnosed HIV positive, the search for a relationship and the harsh judgments of some people when faced with a drag queen waving her manicured figure at them, and in doing so does something rather remarkable: he piles on the wig, the make-up, the fake breasts and all the other paraphernalia of drag but somehow manages to reveal more than he hides. He is willing to do that thing that makes an audience love a performer: to dig deep.
But, and maybe this is the most important bit. Panti Bliss is funny as well, especially when he does what every audience in a drag show would expect and picks on them for a laugh.
He also tackles the politics of the internet, homophobia within the gay community and the random divisions of gender, but he can do what many campaigners are possibly afraid of doing: he can throw in a rude gag, he can be outrageous, he can laugh at a taboo and make us do the same.
Which makes Panti Bliss – even though she looks like your traditional drag queen – different from the others. She is a new, dirty, glamorous genre; she is a performer of great skill whose jokes glitter and cut. She is a new kind of drag queen. I CAN’T remember the last time an audience displayed such a strong sense of affection for a speaker at Aye Write! as it did for playwright and artist John Byrne. Best known to many perhaps for the BBC serial from the 1980s, Tutti Frutti, he was there to talk about the “books that had made him”.
It was perhaps surprising that poets featured more heavily than playwrights (Philip Larkin and George Barker, as versus Simon Gray), and diarist James Lees-Milne.
Byrne, pictured, confessed he hadn’t read a novel since 1957, didn’t watch films and still used typewriter. His audience adored it, but as they wanted to know why they weren’t seeing more of his work on stage, I couldn’t help wonder if perhaps his seeming aversion to new technology and other modes of storytelling was part of the reason.
His reminiscences of times past were fascinating though, and chimed with drummer Woody Woodmansey, who, like Byrne, was working in a factory when art, and fame, claimed him.
Byrne hailed from Paisley, Woodmansey from Hull, and both confounded the road that class had chosen for them.
Woodmansey recalled the night he sat in his parents’ house, trying to decide between a factory promotion and working for then lesserknown David Bowie. “But music was all I wanted,”’ he
Panti Bliss: High Heels in Low Places