Ladies and Gentlemen

TRANSVESTITES are having what must be their best season ever in Dublin theatre.

From the Abbey, with Angels in America and The Hostage, to The Rocky Horror Show at the Tivoli, city stages have been groaning under the weight of men in frocks.

Emma Donoghue's second venture into theatre, Ladies and Gentlemen, continues this surprisingly popular trend, but welcomes women to the cross dressing party, with suitably mixed results.

Donoghue's history of Annie Hindle, a 19th century male impersonator, takes much of its style from the lumpy mix off freak show voyeurism and gross sentimentality that is vaudeville.

Focusing mainly on the dressing room antics of a small group of cross dressing vaudevillians, the play explores the way in which fundamentally malleable characteristics, such as gesture, gait, posture and voice, come to define gender, while pacing through the ways' in which individuals work themselves free of such restrictions.

The play had better be doing something close to that. Otherwise its plodding, threadbare storyline would be indefensible. Without the bandages ceremonially applied to disguise Hindle's breasts, Ladies and Gentlemen could easily be mistaken for a costume melodrama.

As it stands, the extra spin provided by flip flopping genders and the central lesbian relationship only just keep the play moving. Donoghue clearly has far more flair for scattering ideas and manipulating nuance than for dramatic innovation.

Noelle Brown plays Hindle with something short of the fluidity required. James Barry, as the female impersonator Gilbert Saroney, has a less arduous role than Brown, but quickly locates the camp sparkle that the central performance lacks.

Sliding American accents hindered most of the performances and David Byrne, whose direction was otherwise intelligent, might have been wiser to weed them out.

Lighting designer Paul Keoghan obviously had a good time creating some lushly kitsch vaudeville lighting effects, while set designer Irene O'Brien created a flexible, if not tremendously well used, set.