TRANSCRIPT: Chris Bush and Beth Hinton-Lever - Series 4 Episode 1
- James Lovelock
- Sep 20
- 33 min read
Updated: Oct 7
VO: You’re listening to Represent, the queer musical theatre podcast. My name is Dr James Lovelock, my pronouns are they/he and I’m an academic and a huge musical theatre fan exploring the representation of all things queer in the musical theatre industry.
My guests today are the extraordinary writer Chris Bush and the fabulous actor and workshop queen Beth Hinton-Lever. Beth recently appeared in Chris’ play Otherland at the Almeida Theatre, which follows the post break-up relationship between Harry, who has recently come out as a trans woman, and Jo, who is preparing to be a mother. We talk about trans, queer and disability representation as well as exploring Chris’ beautiful musical Standing At The Sky’s Edge, Beth’s West End debut in Hadestown and an epic community musical called The Doncastrian Chalk Circle.
As always, you can follow us on your favourite podcast platform, and don’t forget to share this episode on social media! Let’s get started.
Beth: Hello, my name is Beth Hinton-Lever. My pronouns are she/her and I am an actor. And I think I'm here because I'm also queer and I have a lot of opinions.
James: Hurray! That's what we need on a podcast. Lovely. And Chris?
Chris: Hi. I'm Chris Bush, she/her. I am a playwright, lyricist, theatre maker, sometime screenwriter a little bit occasionally, promoter of queerness across all art forms.
James: Excellent. Excellent stuff. So on this series of the podcast, we're looking a little bit at what the term queer gain means. So what do we gain from queer people being involved in art and particularly musical theatre? I was going to start off today thinking a little bit about some of the projects that you've done, maybe a favourite project that you've done, that you feel is something that you've really connected to as an actor or as a writer.
Chris: I mean, I feel like the last project that we have both done working together, Otherland at the Almeida, was a really special one for me, and came at the end of around seven or eight years of trying to get that show on, which was the third theatre that it had been in development with. I'm very, very thankful to the Almeida for taking a chance on it, really, and saying yes and actually getting it programmed, that's a very kind of long slog to get that far.
It was very, very special, quite close to my heart and quite a personal story in lots of ways, but also I think one of the reasons why it took seven or eight years to get on was that I was striving for a version of queer authenticity, I suppose that some of the theatres maybe weren't as interested in and liked on paper, but then had their own idea of what that story should be and what kind of familiar, slightly tropey beats that would have to hit along the way to be understandable to an audience and actually, you know, sticking to my guns and finding the right partner in the Almeida, we were able to come to the end of a very long road.
Unfortunately, we did then put Beth in it. Setting the tone there, because I feel like most of our friendship is us just being mean to each other, and I feel like it would be really inauthentic to come in here and pretend that's not what we did.
Beth: Chris also used me for, I think, every single workshop, I should say. We do love each other.
Chris: You were there from the… yeah, the only actor I think who did every workshop.
Beth: She can't get rid of me yet. Yeah, I agree. I think Otherland was an incredibly special piece to watch change for so many years and like, as Chris said, she always stuck to her guns with the way in which the queerness is represented and I was incredibly proud to be on that stage with those incredible women, and all the women and the people that also helped us make it and it felt like the Almeida made an incredibly kind of safe space. And I mean that not in the sense of stifling any articulation that might be there, as in, it just felt we could all try and be ourselves and fail and come back from it in a place where it was just held and I think that was really important and to be in that room was really special.
James: It's been really difficult, hasn't it? Because that's that phrase ‘safe space’ is so important for us as queer people, but it's kind of been taken away from us and given this really mollycoddling feel about it. And that's not what we mean at all when we're talking about safe spaces.
Beth: No, it wasn't just, you know, a poster on a wall, it was an actual feeling of safety in that room.
Chris: And that enables people to do their best work, right? Knowing that there's an implicit sense of trust and people have everyone's back and therefore, you get an openness, you get a playfulness and an experimentation in the room that if you're having to second guess yourself as a performer or a writer or as anything, then you're never going to be making your best work. And I think also shout out to Ann Yee, our incredible director in that.
And I get you, because you don't want to get too sort of tokenistic about who are the right people of the team and fundamentally, Ann is just the best theatre director out there and she's extraordinary, but also to have a queer woman helming that team does feel like lots of things are implicitly held, you are actually starting that journey from a relatively high level of understanding.
Interestingly, when we were in the room, we were talking about queerness in general, but more specifically in terms of trans identities and actually, we need to remember that within this group of people, you know, eight actors and however many creatives, we're starting 12 steps ahead of the general discourse on gender identity, for instance. So actually, we need to remember that our audience might not always be with where we are, and [consider] how we are going to enable making work that's going to carry people, carry an audience with us in a way that feels, not like not mollycoddling, but enables people to end up in a place of greater understanding, which I think is the goal of that piece.
Beth: Yeah, the reaction was incredible to Otherland, and it's an incredibly important play, and it's a beautiful play. And I think some of my favourite interactions were the audience who came up to us and said 'thank you, because I now understand my grandson'. We knew what it meant to us, as queer people in the team doing the show, and what was amazing was to know that that understanding and that love and care was extended into an audience that I think it's fair to say, at the Almeida, you're looking at a certain demographic. Yeah, it was so special.
James: I absolutely loved it, it's one of my favourite things that I've seen for a very long time. And I guess as somebody in the queer community, but not necessarily somebody that has a detailed knowledge or lived experience of female queer relationships or trans relationships, I thought it was such a wonderful piece,to be thrust into the middle of this piece, and that's the sort of work I'm looking for. And that's the sort of work I want to champion. And I hope more of that becomes more accessible to people.
I think one of the questions that I'm kind of struggling with at the moment is... So Otherland was great, and it was fantastic, and it was at the Almeida Theatre and lots of people went to see it. But how do we get that play now to other people who might need to see it? What happens next? And I think that's the question I have with a lot of the queer work that we see at the moment, because it tends to be on quite limited runs. And I don't know whether there's any answers to that question or not, or if you have any thoughts about how we kind of share? I mean, particularly, Chris, you know, how we share your work without infringing copyright?
Chris: Yeah, I think it's really hard. And I was so delighted with that production, I genuinely couldn't have asked for a better team of people, other than Beth.
Beth: I knew it was coming!
Chris: I was genuinely so, so proud of it. And this piece broadly was really critically well received, played to more or less full houses for this entire run. But then you run for five weeks and it's quite a big cast for new writing. We had a cast of eight and a band of three. I don't think it is going to have an immediate future life, in the UK at least - I'm still banging on a lot of doors in New York, and I feel like it could play there. I've not given up on that yet. But it's true across the industry that if you've got a new piece that doesn't have real household names leading TV series in it, it's very hard to get that future commercial life for it.
And if you then add on top of that an element of, whether it's queerness, whether it's whatever sort of protected identity or angle that might make it seem less mainstream. And I suppose particularly with something like Otherland, it takes some big theatrical swings as well. It doesn't contain itself within naturalism. I think it is accessible and it's an entertaining night out. It's not hard work, but actually on paper, it can maybe seem like a bit of a tough sell.
And so it's interesting to look at those examples of queerness - I say this, and it might sound like it's pejorative, and I don't mean it to be, but if you take a show like Everybody's Talking About Jamie, which came out of the Crucible, where Standing At The Sky's Edge did as well, and has produced so many incredible shows [and has] a really good track record for new musical theatre. And one of the interesting things about Jamie, which is such a fun night out, is that actually it's incredibly mainstream and accessible in its representations of queerness, which enables it to go to the West End, to tour both nationally and internationally, to reach that audience, because it has, if you like, a non-threatening gloss to it. And I think you will see in all forms, particularly in queer art, the slightly more ‘out there on the fringes’ stuff and the stuff that is able to speak more to a mainstream. Neither one is more important than the other, actually, they're both really necessary in terms of a broader ecology of queer identities [and] queer storylines.
And then to go on to something like Sky's Edge, for instance, which when I first came on board to that project, I wasn't necessarily expecting it to be a show that was going to transfer to the National, transfer to the West End, do the sort of journey that it did. But it feels like the hook of that was: here is a slice of social history, here is the story of post-war Britain within this broadly working-class community in Sheffield, and that was certainly the sell of it in Sheffield, at least, and then it became something a bit more expansive as it grew.
I think there's a danger when you're talking about Northern storylines and working-class storylines. Firstly, the danger that those two things mean the same thing, which clearly they don't, but also that those representations become monolithically straight and white, essentially. And I always knew that wasn't going to be the story that I was going to tell. And it was the primary reason for my initiative going, I want these three storylines to follow these three different families to get a breadth of storytelling possibility. So you're not just following... if we were just stuck with Harry and Rose in 1960 and a direct line of their descendants of white working-class Sheffield-ers - nothing wrong with that story, it’s fascinating - but it doesn't speak to the truth of the city and actually there needs to be racial diversity with that company.
I knew that I wanted a queer relationship at the heart of that story. And it feels a little bit queerness by stealth, in a way. You're not selling that story as a 'queer musical', but it is, and it's not just through Poppy and Nicki, who are that central queer couple, but there's lots of queerness threaded through in other spaces as well, and in other ways. But also, they are just quote unquote, "normal people" who have their dilemmas that isn't being driven by a sense of queer identity, that's not what's throwing them into crisis, or that's not what's propelling them forward, that just happens to be who they are, which I think is also a really important part of queer storytelling, as well as those stories about, no, you actually need to understand what it means to be othered in this way, what it means to be a queer person, a trans person, you know, whatever that might be. But yes, I think there's space for all of it. But it's interesting to see which stories can have that commercial life, and which stories are a much harder sell.
VO: If you're interested in LGBTQ+ representation in musical theatre, check out our website www.queermusicals.com for lots more information about musicals with LGBTQ+ characters.
James: One of the things I love about you, Beth, is that every time I see something about you on social media, you're workshopping something. And I feel like you are the workshop queen.
Beth: Thank you.
James: And I also love that the stuff that you workshop often has themes of otherness, and often themes of queerness as well. And I think one of the things I'm thinking about is how do we take some of these shows that are in workshop stages, how do we get them to the next stage? And I guess maybe a better question is, are there shows that you've workshopped that you love that you're waiting to see what happens to next?
Beth: I mean, as you say, I love a workshop. I think it's an incredibly exciting period of time for any production and to get to go in as an actor and have a hand in the narrative and the voice of that character and the way that they fit into the world. And I mean, I've said this before, but every role I ever play, in my opinion, is queer and disabled because I can't splice those two things away from me. It's so intrinsically in the essence of who I am that I carry that into these roles. So I think when I am workshopping, without meaning to, even if it's not explicitly a pansexual character, they all end up being that way.
So I think one of my favourite shows I've ever workshopped was actually the show that Chris and I met on, which was a retelling of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which became The Doncastrian Chalk Circle. It was part of the Public Acts program at the National Theatre, which is an incredible program. And I love it dearly and I've worked with them before. So I got asked to come in and do this workshop.
And I was playing Saffiya Shashava, so the queering of [the role of] Simon. And I read The Caucasian Chalk Circle, I think it must have been at GCSE level. And I remember not really caring about this masculine soldier that seemingly leaves his girlfriend and wasn't really interested, or more interested in this goose is what I remember from Simon! And then to read this incredible version of it, which was also a musical and just from the virtue that Saffiya was then in a queer relationship with Grusha, and the fact that there was a child there and Saffiya loves that child as if it was her own, I think there was something so beautiful about this epic love story that spanned decades and years, and they waited for each other and they yearned for each other and she protected Grusha and she thought of her, and I think there was something so special about the epic-ness of it, that I think especially in old stories, we don't really find for queer characters.
And I thought that was amazing to the point where we finished that workshop and we did a sharing and I went up to Chris and James Blakey, the director and just went, you're not auditioning anyone else for this role, I'm playing it. And somehow that worked. And it was amazing. And I think one of my favourite things about Public Acts as a program as well is there are five professional actors and over a hundred community members that all come and fill out this beautiful company and this cast. And from all ages - I think from the youngest is usually about four, which is amazing, and then up to a hundred or however old, and to get to portray a gay relationship where we had, you know, no one questioned 'Why are they gay? Why is she a woman?' They just went, 'yeah, that's who they are'. And they loved them and they really adored them.
And I think me and my Grusha, Daisy [Ann Fletcher], we kissed and we were a bit like, the first time we did it, OK, what are this community going to think? Are we going to get some awkward questions? We got a massive round of applause and a cheer. I just think there's something so special about taking some of these stories that we think we know and changing them to become this kind of queer relationship and what that can do and what that can mean and what it can show that community and it was amazing. It was absolutely incredible to do that. And that's probably one of my favourite, if not my favourite show I've ever done.
I also started my career in Doncaster, so it felt like a really nice homecoming to go back there. And the last show I did there before Doncastrian Chalk Circle was a pantomime where it was a queer relationship. So it just felt incredible. And then when we had community members coming up to me and saying, you know, I think I might be queer. And as a queer actor, I got to then have something to hold their hand and say, OK, well, I remember when I came out or this is what I told my mom. And that was incredible from virtue of casting a queer person in a queer role. So it was just such a special thing.
And obviously, I met Chris, which is up and down, but what can we do?
Chris: Yeah, because I think there's such a presumption that queerness only exists or at least can only be celebrated in London, maybe Brighton, maybe Manchester. Somewhere like Doncaster - can you really have a queer relationship? Of course you fucking can! Why wouldn’t you? But actually, that kind of visible representation on stage feels like it is a significant thing. And again, in terms of how you get those queer narratives into a mainstream, I feel like the phrase in my head is ‘queerness by stealth’, which feels like deeply problematic.
Beth: But I also want it tattooed on my body, it’s amazing.
Chris: But taking a classic story and finding that as your angle into it. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is (ten second summary) - Poor woman working in the kitchens finds this child that's been abandoned by rich family who are fleeing in midst of revolution, raises it as her own. Then the birth mother comes back and there's a big trial, who gets to raise this child, who will provide the best home for it? Is it the person who's been raising this child or the person who's biologically connected to it? Which feels like an open goal to tell a story about chosen family, about queer family, and by making that central relationship by going, you are not my blood, but you are still mine. And to find those transgressive conversations about belonging, about your tribe, about who are the people who have your back, which feels like it was so in the spirit of absolutely everything that I believe Brecht is standing for in terms of the centre of the community, in terms of, you know, the garden belongs to the ones who will tend it. This idea of what it means when a community sort of comes together.
Even though we were taking some sort of quite wild swings in terms of changing plot points, the Brecht estate were really great. I thought they were going to be a lot more difficult to navigate, but actually they were really up for this story, even though we were changing quite a lot of plot, because I think absolutely it was in the spirit of it. We were not fundamentally trying to make that show anything that it isn't at its heart.
James: I think that's one of the things that people come back to quite a lot with musical theatre is they say that because it's an adaptive medium, that's the excuse for stories being maybe 30 or 40 years behind us and particularly for queerness, obviously, that's a really big deal.
And at the moment in the West End, I'm not sure that we have any musicals that have a queer protagonist at the moment. I think Why Am I So Single? was the last show that was true of. And so it's great to hear about how you can reinvent stories and particularly classic stories as well. And you talked about the Brecht estate there. One of the things I was really interested to find was that there was a gender-swapped queer version of Oklahoma! that the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation allowed to happen at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival about five or six years ago. And I love that. I mean, it must have taken years to get the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation to that stage. But I think there's something to be said about how you go about, you know, taking older stories and kind of adding, sprinkling queerness among them. I don't know.
Beth: Yeah. I mean, I will shout out the fact that there is a show called After the Act currently at the Royal Court, which is brilliant. It's a new musical about Section 28. But again, that was made elsewhere [the New Diorama Theatre] and then has gone into the Royal Court. So it's I think it would be amazing if some of these big theatres and companies were, you know, creating them and putting them onto those stages. But it's a brilliant musical and that is currently on. But again, for a really, really limited run.
Chris: I was going to say two things. One is that I don't know if that is the production, but I think the Oregon Oklahoma! might have been worked on by Ann Yee because I know that she did a very queer Oklahoma! somewhere in America. I'm wondering how many of them that there would have been anyway, because I know that it wasn't the Daniel Fish one that came over here and did very well.
It's really interesting and heartbreaking if that is the case, that there isn't a musical currently in the West End with a queer protagonist, because we do think of musical theatre in particular as being such an innately queer medium. But actually, you look at the codification of queerness and how everyone knows that this character has an essence of... Straying outside of musicals, but there's a really, really beautiful section in After the Act when a character describes their queer awakening coming from a teacher breaking down the queerness that exists within Streetcar Named Desire and other Tennessee Williams works and going, this presented as a cis straight woman is so coded as a queer man. And hopefully we're coming out of a point of the necessity for a codification or a disguising of queer narrative to make it more palatable. And queerness evolves.
I think that's also a really interesting question about who queerness on stage is for, and whether you are seeking to make work that speaks broadly to your community, and going, this is one for us, I see you and you are a valid human, you can go and watch a reflection of yourself on stage and feel something really powerful, versus something that is primarily for an audience who is not that. And this applies again whatever protected minority that might be, whether that's to do with queerness, whether that's to do with race, whether that's to do with class of going, is this one for us or is it one for them so we are better understood?
And of course, the best work will do both of those things, and I hope that a show like Otherland is able to do both of those things in terms of showing authentic representation that somebody can see and go, 'yeah, that's me', but also something that someone can bring their mum to, can bring their gran to and go, 'this is me, can you watch this please?'
VO: If you want to follow us on social media, you can use queer.musicals on Instagram or Facebook, or you can follow me @drjameslovelock on Instagram.
Chris: Interestingly, those totems of queerness as well, in queer musical theatre... Quite recently the wonderful Jackie Clune, who was also in Otherland, finished a stint as the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a bunch of us from the Otherland company went out to watch this on tour. And I was struck by how this show that is such a queer icon, and rightly so in all sorts of ways, feels like it is now playing to such a straight audience in a way that I felt kind of almost uncomfortable being there. It feels like it's going for that hen party-esque crowd where it's the equivalent, and this is amaybe unfair to hen parties, of course I'm making broad generalisations, but to the hen party who go to the gay bar and it's all a bit like going to watch the monkeys at the zoo, and it's going, oh, this is a performance of queerness not to bring a better case of understanding of that, but as a form of titillation, and I'm not sure how comfortable I feel about that.
But then also it's whatever lens that you as an individual bring to anything that you're experiencing, and you can't always ask a production to cater to your thing. Because also, I was watching that show going, it is not the fault of Richard O'Brien or anyone responsible for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, that Frank N Furter, this incredible creature, this queer alien transvestite from transsexual Transylvania, is now full of sort of tropes and signifiers that terrible prejudiced people apply to trans women, in terms of this sort of figure who towers a foot above anybody else on stage, and is sort of broad-shouldered and has five o'clock shadow, but is wearing this sort of high-femme get-up and heels, and is over-sexualised, and is aggressively sexual, and is deviant.
The Rocky Horror Show makes no claim, and never has, and never will be, that this is a representation of trans women. Absolutely not. And yet, is there a degree of uncomfortableness of going and experiencing that? Maybe there is for some people, but that's not the fault of the show. I guess, that's just art, baby. That's what we're all wrestling with. But I think you can't pick your audience, and whoever buys a ticket is very welcome to come through the door and watch a show. But it's interesting how you interpret those sorts of things, because at the moment, to me anyway, Rocky Horror on stage no longer feels like this subversive, queer, underground thing. It feels like a performance of something that doesn't feel like it's authentic, or healing, or helping. I've got no objection to queer theatre being a fun night out, and not everything needs to be, you know, a tutorial. That's not what I'm saying.
James: I think you're right there. And I think with The Rocky Horror Show as well, because it's, I think it was 1973, it first came out, or somewhere around that time. So it's 50 years old now. And I think there is a case sometimes for looking at work that's still going around. I mean, The Rocky Horror Show is one example. There's so many examples of musicals that still go around on tour. And you think, I'm not sure how helpful it is that things like The King and I seem to still go round and round, despite the obvious problematic tropes that are in that as well.
It also leads me to this other thing I've been thinking about, which goes back to the thing you're saying about who are we making these musicals for, and thinking about, well, maybe the West End or Broadway or whatever it is, is not where our musicals or these musicals necessarily need to be. But then the question becomes, how do we get the people who need to see these shows to be able to know where they are and find them?
Beth: I remember we had a conversation about that with Otherland, because we were saying, it felt like we were, in some ways, preaching to the choir, talking to our friends, which was incredible. And those shows should be able to hold the community and invite them in. But it was one of those shows where the people that would learn the most from it, how do you encourage them to buy a ticket?
And then there was also this, it's very unfortunate, we had to have the conversation, but I think it's important that we did because it's about safety, about if there were protesters who came to come see the show, how would we deal with that? How would we keep members of our company and our team safe? Or, you know, how can we look after each other in that way? And I think that's also... I mean, I'm not a producer and my goodness, I never should be. But if, you know, you were going to do ‘Big Gay Play’, and put it on Broadway or the West End, whether that's even something that would cross those producers’ minds of the safety of the company.
This is going to be, this is a very off-tandem thought I've had, but I was trying to think of the last time, you know, as a big West End company, we had to have a safety talk, and it was about the Just Stop Oil protesters. And about, you know, if they stage invade, this is what you do. And then I was going, but we haven't had this safety conversation with any other thing. And I think, I don't know if that even would be a concern. But I don't know, I thought it was an odd thing that in Otherland, we were all so aware of it. And so wanting to be able to look after each other, that we had to have that conversation.
Chris: I think also we shouldn't be seeing the West End as the be-all and end-all and not every show needs to end up there. People also need queer theatre they can afford to see and they need it where they are. My partner, who's a writer and also a stage manager, worked on a Pentabus production of a Charlie Josephine show called One of Them Ones, a really brilliant play about two brothers, one cis, one trans, trying to find a better understanding between the two of them while doing this classically masculine thing of, one of them's a painter and decorator, and they paint this room over the course of the show. It's this brilliant conceit of, I'm talking to you about something difficult, so I can't make eye contact with you, so I'm going to go and paint this wall.
Anyway, great show. And Charlie Josephine is brilliant. And it's Pentabus, so it did come in for a run at Brixton House. So it had a little London stint, but they are a rural touring company and were playing small sort of art centres, village halls, very small places in the sort of rural communities that don't have an arts council subsidised theatre within. And so the stuff that goes on in the village hall, in the pop-up venue, in whatever it is, is broadly seen by everyone who has a vague interest in the arts, regardless of what it is. So whether you're seeing a new queer Charlie Josephine play, whether you're seeing Alan Ayckbourn, whether you're seeing Shakespeare on bikes, whatever it might be.
And one of the great things about London is this ability to find your tribe. On any given night, if I'm in the mood for a Royal Court kind of show, I can go to the Court. If I'm in the mood for a Bush show, I can go to the Bush. Any one of these sort of things, you will be catered for, presuming you can afford to buy a ticket.
But actually, in terms of like, fostering connection between a community of going, 'no, we all come'. And it's that magic thing that a theatre can sometimes do when it feels like going to church, going to temple, when you're going, 'yeah, we all come'. And we see this thing. And this week, we're seeing two brothers come to an understanding about who they are and their relationship with each other and their gender. And next week, we're going to come for a murder mystery. And next week, we're going to come for basket weaving. And that feels like that should be the goal. And then queerness becomes as normalized as anything else rather than going, oh, I should go and see the queer show in town. Do you know what I mean?
Beth: Yeah.
James: No, I think that's very fair, actually. And I think also that's something that's really strong about some of our regional theatres as well. I mean, we mentioned Sheffield Theatres earlier on, and the fact that they've had Everybody's Talking About Jamie, they've had Standing at the Sky's Edge. But they've also had recently they had a production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
But like you say, people have got memberships to go and see everything at the theatre. I remember some time ago, interviewing somebody at the Theatre Calgary in Canada, who said exactly the same thing. He tries to program as many different shows as he can because he knows that the audience will always be there for it. And that's really interesting. And perhaps something, as academics, we don't think about enough.
I've recently been teaching in Sheffield, which has been great. And, and so Standing at the Sky's Edge has been fantastic, because I look out of the window of the university and I see where the musical is set. And I think there's something about things which are so clearly set in a place that really help to link it to the community. I was going to ask you a little bit about some of the other characters in Standing at the Sky's Edge as well, because I loved that Poppy and Nikki were so central in that, but I also loved the fact that there was Marcus, and Marcus's partner. And then I think it was quite heavily implied, George as well. And to have all of those queer characters in this story that covered so many decades was just something so wonderful. And I wondered whether that was that a conscious decision? Or did they just kind of appear as you were writing them?
Chris: Yeah, I think I always knew that one of those three core relationships of the three timelines was always going to be a queer one. And that felt important. And then I think things kind of organically evolved from that point from going, it's quite nice to have this friendship between Poppy and Marcus and to be able to land the gag of each of them thinking that the other one might think it's a date and how will they let the other one down because they're both raging homosexuals.
James: I loved that.
Chris: And then you branching out to the New Year's scene where there are lots of other queer couples as well, because yeah, we hang out together who's going to be at your [party]? It's not going to necessarily be an exclusively queer gathering, but you're going to find your tribe, you're going to find this community. And also felt significant to go, it's not just the outsider, it's not Poppy from the metropolis of London bringing queerness up north, but going, no, it exists here as well. And it doesn't only exist in the sort of present-day strand, which I think is why it feels important, it's very light touch, but to drip that in with George as well. We don't see his partner, but he refers to a partner at the end.
And I mean, who knows whether it'll ever happen, because such is the whims of TV production. But in theory, we're making a TV show. It's so far from being green lit so I think I'm allowed to say this because people know that we're developing it. But if that does happen, then it gives us the scope to dive into so many more of those characters backstories and George's sexual awakening, or not awakening, but being able to live more as himself as he gets more settled in the area is going to be something we're gonna be able to explore far more in a series if we ever get to make it, which feels like an exciting thing as well.
James: Yeah, absolutely. I think the song ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours’, which is just a beautiful song anyway. and you hear George sing it in a very strong Liberian accent. And that means one thing, but then to go back when you realize that George is also queer and for the song to mean something completely different and to mean something entirely different to what it meant originally when Richard Hawley wrote it - I think one of the things I love most about Standing At The Sky's Edge is how you use the songs that were completely different from the very beginning. I didn't even realize it was a jukebox musical until afterwards, which for all that people sometimes have problems with there being so many jukebox musicals, actually, if you when you can write a really clever jukebox musical, then it gives you this room to make your own story around it. And that allows you then to get free from the movie or whatever it is that you're writing the story from.
VO: This series of Represent has been recorded at the Content is Queen studio in Somerset House. Content is Queen a podcast agency and community, made up of women, people of colour and LGBTQIA+ people who wish to connect, create and collaborate using audio and podcasting. For more information or to book the studio, go to contentisqueen.org.
James: So thinking about musical theatre in the future and where we are in terms of musical theatre at the moment, what sort of shows or what sort of characters or stories would you like to see more of in musical theatre?
Beth: As we've said the whole way through, I wish that there was more of an opportunity for those shows that are being developed at places like the Edinburgh Fringe and on university campuses. If you look at Operation Mincemeat, one of the biggest commercial successes this country has come up with for a very, very long time.
Those shows that have those queer characters and that queer love and relationships - the actual reality of being alive and a human being in this world is that there are queers everywhere and we're wonderful. Having more of those stories to a point where, as you said, it's not, oh, the gay shows here or there's a queer show in town. I'd want to see a kind of fabric of across the country up and down of those relationships being there. Because I think having that relationship in a theatre and it not always being about coming out, and about the hardships and the othering and feeling insecure in that. But if we had that real joy and happy relationships and relationships with older people because it seems that there's a real focus on young coming out stories, not just settled down living with my partner in the Lake District stories, To see that coming through would be incredible.
And, I think moving away from, well, this is a male character or a female character and moving into, let's see who comes in. I think that's to do with the States as well. Just being more open to, well, actually, you know, why couldn't Orpheus be a woman and why couldn't Eurydice be a woman? Why couldn't that story be told this way if we just change a couple of keys? I love Hadestown, I'm using Hadestown as an example because I did it.
James: And also Hadestown has done that particularly with the role of Hermes that has been changed virtually every time it's been done.
Beth: And I'd love to see that across the board with, well, anyone who comes in can play anyone. And I think that would be exciting. There's a bit at the beginning of Act Two where Hermes and Persephone share a bit of a flirtation, a bit of a kiss. And that's always just a little bit of a sprinkle of, ooh, maybe they're gay. Well, why can't we just say it? Why does it have to be a little like hint in a tantalizing, oh, this might be? Just be proud and loud and say it.
And with Mean Girls, there are queer characters in that. But again, I'd love to have seen them end happy. And I know it's a musical. I know we all want to get to 2 hours 20 and out. But, it would be amazing if we just cut one minute from somewhere else and give them a love story at the end. I don't know. I just think I'd like to see more of an active thought of the portrayal of queerness in musical theatre and not kind of it being there as a foil to the lead straight couple, I think would be nice.
James: Yeah, that sounds great. Chris, do you have any thoughts?
Chris: So many thoughts. I think it would be nice to get to a point where you can have queer-led musicals that aren't driven by a crisis over their queerness or their gender identity or isn't about the struggles and the pressure. I mean, it's drama, so it's all about conflict, right? So you need some struggles, but do they need to be defined by sexuality?
I think, to make some great sweeping statements about the sort of history of queer theatre of which I am not a scholar, but it feels like you have this progression where firstly, everything needs to be codified. So you can't have any queer characters at all. You can only have characters that can be sort of read with a queer lens if you know what you're looking for. Then if you have queerness, the story has to be about struggle. Maybe it's about the AIDS crisis. Maybe it's about horrific homophobic tags, whatever it may or may not be. Then people cheer up a little bit, and all these things continue as well. But then you start to introduce your queer comedies and then it's going, this is still a story that's absolutely driven by sexuality because it's about the dating life of gay men. But again, the queerness is the USP of that production. And then you get to a point where, yes, as a supporting role, you can have a character who just happens to be queer and it's not necessarily at the heart, but maybe they are the sassy sidekick. And also in all of those things that I've just laid out as well, 90% of those stories are cis white gay male stories of queerness. So again, it's one part of a lens.
And again, that story, we would joke about it in the Otherland rehearsal rooms of going, we're not doing the sad man puts on lipstick version of trans representation, which is the only fucking story that you ever get. People really need to stop doing it because it's so exhausting and just generally bad. And anyone who does it should be ashamed. But how much of trauma dumping do we need to get through, and then we'll have the trans romcom and then we'll just have the, this character can be trans and maybe that's fine. And then maybe they can leave the show, you know? I'd like to get to that point where it's a facet, and it does have an impact on your life in a way that any aspect of your identity does.
I have certain issues with what we sometimes refer to as colourblind casting in terms of race, or this idea that you could gender flip a character from a canonical text, from a Shakespeare, from a musical or whatever, but not have to change a word. Because I think normally, if they're not protagonists, if they're small enough supporting roles, sometimes that doesn't make any difference. Sometimes there's enough there that you go, oh, this is an interesting thing. But I think generally, like with Chalk Circle, you have to wade in and fuck around with the text in order to make that work. Because otherwise you are still pushing othered and minority identities into this cis-het framework and going, 'it's all the same if you don't look too hard'.
I had a little bit of an issue with Constellations, the Nick Payne play in the West End revival a few years ago, which is a brilliant play by a great writer and a really classy production. But of these multiple couples of going, quote, unquote, here's the "normal" one, here's the white cishet couple, and then we've got the black couple, and then we've got the older couple, and then we've got the queer couple. And if you see that original production, which again was incredible, at the Royal Court with Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, those characters are written as a very specific type of thirty-something cis-het, metropolitan, middle class couple, and how they behave is codified in such a manner. And then to squish another identity into that, I feel for me, isn't doing justice to that identity, because queerness does make a difference to the way in which you exist in the world in the same way that race does or that disability does or that anything else might.
So actually, I am all for smart queering of existing text, particularly existing stories where you can riff on a frame where you can go, I'm going to rewrite this myth, this iconic thing, this existing tale. But I think when you're going, I can just take this boilerplate script off the shelf and recast it, sometimes you run into difficulties. So alongside that sort of reclaiming of stories, I would like to get to a point where we can have mainstream queer storylines where that's a facet of life, and it is something that has an impact in the way in which this character moves through the world, but it isn't the one thing that defines them. I feel like that should be the end goal of representation for me.
Beth: Yeah, if you're queering a character, but not kind of taking care with it... Being in this industry and being a creative and being an actor and being part of this kind of community, one of the beautiful things about this world is, I hate this word, but it is diverse and eclectic, and all these different personalities and lived experiences and people it attracts. And by not giving them the chance and not giving the writer the chance or the director the chance to really put themselves into it. I think the point of me as an actor is to try and tell the truth, so if I'm not allowed to use my real, my whole truth, there is always going to be something that's not fully taking shape in a way that I think it can.
It's amazing. I don't know if it was Chalk Circle, it might have been. There was a line in it, and it said 'hands' and I had to say, 'take my hands'. And it took me ages to build up the confidence to go, ‘Chris Bush, could we possibly, could I say hand? Because I have one. And I just think it takes me out of the character’. And you were like, yeah, of course. And I think if there were more people with that in mind and going, oh, does that not sit well in your brain, in your mouth? It doesn't really sound like something you might say. So let's just change it a little bit. And the more that we can do that....
And it links to being queer as well, the more that you go, actually, this is the way that I would say this, or it just makes it feel more authentic. And I think as people in the creative industry, we can see it. But for an audience who, it might be their first time ever seeing a play, I think you can feel when something is real, and something feels right for that person. I think that would be an amazing place to get to, if with the stories and with these characters and these people, we could give it more to the real person in that community. And I think that would be an exciting kind of flip.
James: I think that is so exciting. When I'm talking to people on these episodes, that's the thing that makes me most excited when people say, actually, as an actor, I was involved in developing this, or as a director, I was able to do this. And that idea of multiple people being able to be involved in creating these characters. And you're right, I think that is part of what makes authentic representation.
Thank you very much, Chris and Beth for joining us on the podcast today. And thank you very much, everyone for listening at home, and we'll see you soon.
Chris and Beth: Thank you. Bye.
VO: Thank you for listening to Represent, the queer musical theatre podcast. This research for this series is funded by the British Academy Early Career Researchers’ Network Seed Fund, and supported by Sheffield Hallam University. The episodes were recorded at the Content is Queen podcast studios at the Makerversity at Somerset House – for more information, go to contentisqueen.org.
Next week we continue exploring Standing At The Sky’s Edge with actor and writer Lauryn Redding, who played Nikki in the original West End cast at the Gillian Lynne theatre.
See you next time!
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