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Friday 9 January 2009

Voices of reason

To Be Straight With You
Lyttelton

American Briefs
Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1

It’s been said that the Catholic Church has always known how to deal with extremists. It also knows — or used to know — how to deal with homosexuals. Monasteries populated by ‘celibate’ bachelors, nunneries teeming with wimpled lesbians, these were the discreetly sanctioned gay playgrounds which gave the Church licence to exploit a talent pool it would have lost had it rigorously pursued the technical prohibition against homosexuality. In fact, the Old Testament God isn’t a particularly virulent homophobe. Cattle-rustlers and liars are mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Gays aren’t. And you have to read the Bible, and the Koran for that matter, pretty closely to find the specific verses of denunciation. But in recent times these scriptural footnotes have provided Christian and Islamic fundamentalists with a worldwide charter for persecution.

This is the background to Lloyd Newson’s show at the Lyttelton, a blend of verbal testimony, music and physical theatre. Put like that it doesn’t sound hugely appetising but this is a revelatory production, wittily staged, and crammed with appalling documentary truths and flashes of uplifting eccentricity. Britain has become a haven for gay refugees fleeing the crescent of hate which rises in Zimbabwe, spreads through eastern Africa, crosses the Gulf of Aden into the Middle East, India, Bangladesh and the Muslim archipelagos of south-east Asia. The victims’ experiences suggest the half-forgotten horrors of medieval torture. A gay Iraqi doctor, driven from his country like a traitor, discovered that his lover had been casually abducted and murdered. A Zimbabwean lesbian was raped with a bottle by male members of her own family. In Jamaica rappers compose dance tracks that encourage listeners to shoot gay men in the head. ‘Boom Bye Bye’ is the chorus of one such charming lyric. The home-grown evidence is just as harrowing. A Cockney thug imprisoned for four years after drunkenly attacking a gay man eventually acknowledges his homosexuality.

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