New play alert! the brilliant Pen and Paper Theatre co have started a podcast, and I have the honour of being included in the first!
You can hear it here, performed by the brilliant Phillipa Howe.
My short play 'Flipcharts and Phillip Schofield' was first written and performed as part of The Other Room theatre in Cardiff's SEEN series. A monthly evening where work in progress is shared. I always had further plans for this piece, granted those plans did not include a pandemic and a shift to a lot of online work but here we are.
This piece is close to my heart. In some ways its a thing ripped straight from the heart. Albeit delivered in a format that makes me think of Fleabag, not for the blatant one-woman-show manner but for the cutting line that I can't quite remember but is basically 'not everything needs to be delivered like a stand-up punchline'.
Which for me, and shows like Fleabag, that way of speaking about it, that mask of humour, is the way in. To get to the real stuff. And yes, maybe because we all like to think we're a bit funny.
This piece is a humourous look at what it means to be a bisexual 30-something today. At the fact you fancy exactly 5 men as the tweets suggest. And that if you don't dress like a lesbian, but also don't have a husband...you tend to confuse both sides of the sexuality divide. That at 30-something, you're also possibly dead in Gay years. And if you try and hang out at a cool Lesbian night, you'll feel like someone's dowdy Mum in the corner. It's about feeling like you want to be down with the cool generation coming up after you...but also they don't quite understand what it was like being Queer 15 years ago when you started to figure this stuff out.
It's the feeling of not having had emojis in social media bios. Or having to 'Come Out' one by one instead of an Instagram post...and it was not having lots of cool role models to choose from when it came to being Queer. And that's why one man (and his Gopher) coming out in 2020, meant more than maybe younger kids who don't remember the Broom Closet (which now takes on a whole new meaning) understand.
It's a minefield putting stuff like this out there. People won't agree with me talking about Phillip Schofield's coming out in this way. I know I've literally had the emails. To be honest I'm not that emotionally invested in Schofield as a human, some of his politics have been questionable at best. But that wasn't the point. His story was a useful jumping-off point, a reminder that the 30 somethings have had a foot in each camp- part the generation who were able to grow up online, but part the generation who were still a bit left behind. LGBTQ+ visibility was playing a lot of catch up through our lives. As the line goes in the play 'my 25-year-old brother had to google section 28, I lived it'. We're a sandwich generation between one which was devastated and decimated, and even more hidden than we were and a generation that sometimes can't fathom what it was like for us. And that's why I wrote this piece, as a jumping-off point to starting that conversation, with myself, and with audiences.
It's fitting that this comes out as Pride Month begins. A very different Pride Month than we're used to.
I'm always anxious about putting work out there- who wouldn't be as a writer, creator, whatever. But this piece especially. Any piece that deals with sexuality still runs a risk to some degree. Just before Jordan at Pen and Paper Theatre asked me if they could use this on the podcast, I was sat sobbing at my computer, because I'd received an email detailing what a vile person I was for writing this piece. That it was offensive to all kinds of people, and that I was a terrible person for putting it out there. From creative work to academic work it's not the first time, and it won't' be the last similar comments have been made (my 'favourite' still being the academic who asked if I was 'really allowed' to write about 'those people' but that's a story for another day).
Maybe I'm over-sensitive. Maybe it's a case of 'you put work out there expect criticism' but I think for people who have never experienced that side of the coin, this isn't criticism, it's the fear that we all grew up with a little or a lot...that as soon as you stick a head over the parapet a bit that's what you still, even today run the risk of.
And I say that from my very clear place of privilege- as a cisgender White woman. But that's why it's also important, in writing about this piece, that I acknowledge what even I get leveled at me. I'm able to cope with a bit of a cry at the particularly nasty stuff and go on doing what I do. And so I should, I think in order to allow others to as well.
It's also important that we all tell these stories, take ourselves out of our Broom Cupboards, because that's the way to keep moving forward.
Listen to Flipcharts and Phillip Schofield here
Follow Pen and Paper Theatre over on
PEN & PAPER THEATRE CO. - Pen & Paper Home
www.penandpapertheatre.co.uk
