Reviews

Today's reviews are of events in the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival

Me and Marlene

Cobalt Café

Gerry Colgan

Gloves Off Productions from Manchester are offering this one-woman show as part of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, and it is a tribute to its subject that her Christian name is sufficient identification. This is a stage biography of the great Dietrich, presented by actress Patricia Hartsborne who looks and sounds like her; but the distance of the commentator is cleverly maintained. There has only ever been one Marlene, and this is a homage, not a simulation.

Dietrich graduated to the stage in the seedy, depraved world of Berlin. She is still associated with the film The Blue Angel, in which she played Lola, the quintessential tart with no heart, and sang Falling in Love Again in German, here reprised. We are treated later to the sanitised English version.

She moved to Hollywood in the 1930s, defying Hitler and his Third Reich, starred in a string of films and became an American citizen in 1937. There were famous names among her string of conquests, mostly men but not excluding women. Marlene was ambivalent in sexual matters.

Later she toured the world with her one-woman shows, singing the songs that are still remembered. There were Lily Marlene, La Vie en Rose (borrowed from Piaf), See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have, Where Have All the Flowers Gone and so many more. Drugs and drink undermined her, and when she fell during a performance in Australia and broke her femur, her act was over. She died in Paris at 90, a virtual recluse.

Our hostess for the evening conveys all this with professional accuracy and some charm, clearly a labour of love.

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On The Margins

Smock Alley Studio, Dublin

Peter Crawley

Presenting two remarkably dissimilar plays together as a double bill entitled On The Margins, The Dublin Gay Theatre Festival seems to have created its own little ghetto. Focusing on the transgendered and bisexuals, these plays may sketch the margins of sexuality and society - but the term becomes increasingly problematic.

Indeed, if you learn anything from the Israeli playwright Ronny Almog, it is about the politics of naming. "Am I a boy or what?" sings a young Jewish girl picking her way through a floor scattered with shoes (they don't always fit, I assume) at the start of Somewhere In Between.

Coming closest to justifying the marginal rubric, Almog's play offers a series of vignettes where sexual identity doesn't fit between traditional brackets. In director Issi Mamanov's production, however, identity may be probed and challenged but usually at the expense of personality.

We get monologues, poems, music, movement, all continually reiterating the same questions - Am I a man? Am I a woman? - through the unenticing form of a drama workshop. Posing the question theologically, jokily, syllogistically and, very briefly, through raw association with Middle-Eastern politics, it isn't quite enough to involve an audience. At one point even the playwright puts in a personal appearance. Gender could be redefined and shrugged off through a new language, Almog suggests (with not much optimism), but it seems fatal to leave character behind with it.

The South African play Happy Endings Are Extra is more formally conservative, involving a fateful love triangle between gay, bi-sexual and straight characters, but considerably more successful. With just the flick of its title, Ashraf Johaardien's oh-so-clever script funnels a Capetown subculture of open relationships and rent-boys through the hideous fatalism of Greek Tragedy.

Wittily crafted, breezily allusive and handsomely performed by Ralph Lawson, Deidre Wolhuter and Peter Jacobs, the play is considerably less concerned with sexual orientation than in updating our universal fables of desire and deception. It's a commendable inclusion to this festival, certainly, but there's nothing marginal about its success. Neville Engelbrecht's engaging production for Artscape Arena would be a commendable inclusion to any theatre festival.

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