ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Hedwig and the Angry Inch
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JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Leeds Playhouse & HOME Manchester
IT’S entrance worthy of a megastar. Hedwig (RuPaul’s Drag Race UK contestant Divina De Campo) struts through the audience, whooping up applause, before taking to the stage to sing the Bowie-influenced Tear Me Down; her stars and stripes cape opened to reveal the slogan “gender is a construct.”
It’s not the only thing that’s a construct. In a show that’s described as being a “musical, a cabaret and a stream of consciousness,” it soon transpires that Hedwig is a megastar only in her head. She plays in a scuzzy northern working men’s club while her former mentee Tommy Gnosis, whose hits she co-wrote, performs to a packed Roundhay Park.
The cult show, written by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, tells how she arrived at this point in a series of sketchy flashbacks. Born in communist East Berlin before moving to Kansas, she presents herself as the missing link between east and west, and an alternative to binary divisions due to a botched gender reassignment operation.
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