Mirrorball: Can a children’s play counteract a conspiracy theory?

Across the brightly illustrated pages of the children’s book My Shadow is Pink, written by Scott Stuart, an effete young child wrestles with feeling out of place. Their hirsute, manly father has a blue shadow that follows him everywhere, but the youngster’s silhouette is hot pink and poised like a ballerina. It’s an uplifting tale of a parent getting over macho hang-ups and encouraging their child to be themselves.

Some have been lucky to see this enchanting entertainment read aloud by Cherrie Ontop – the drag creation of actor Matthew Cavan, luminous in a rainbow cape dress and a wig of bubble gum-blue squiggles. Cherrie is mostly known for a decade-long residency at Belfast’s Cabaret Supper Club, where she sang a mix of musical theatre standards and reimagined contemporary pop songs, but she is also the kind host of Drag Queen Storytime: a children’s event which originated in the United States that sees drag queens engage in learning activities to promote diversity. Not everyone has been on board with the venture; Cavan’s new musical for young audiences, Mirrorball, produced by Replay Theatre Company, is about a drag queen on the run.

Mirrorball sounds like a cross between a disco-synth entertainment and a science fiction horror. A dazzling opening song introduces Cherrie performing at her cabaret, before returning to her dressing room where she is cornered by a group of human-like machines. Desperate for escape, she smashes a mirror and – like Alice through the looking glass – passes through into an alternative dimension.

“This musical is about how wonderful it can be when you step into your own life,” says Cavan, with a smile. He knows what it is like to be knocked off that stride. Every year on World Aids Day, activists try to alleviate the stigma surrounding HIV – a conversation that is more prevalent now than in 2010, when Cavan bravely gave an interview with the Belfast Telegraph about being HIV positive. He was trying to help people by overturning myths about the virus. He didn’t expect strangers to send him threatening messages on the internet.

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Cavan admits to entering a long depression during the period after the interview. “For three years I felt like I was falling apart inside,” he says. One day, a friend convinced him to start acting again, in the role of Frank-N-Furter – the gender-bending alien of Jim Sharman’s cult musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Among those impressed by Cavan’s striking voice and mettlesome expressions was the manager of the Cabaret Supper Club, who wanted him to sing in drag at the venue. Over the next decade, he honed the character Cherrie Ontop.

In conversation, Cavan is a picture of gratitude, and speaks of drag as if it has personal, therapeutic effects. He credits Cherrie with getting his life back on track: “Drag can help nurture you, and help you overcome so many things”. He seems to have used the character to re-cast himself in a combative role. While making a short documentary about the actor titled Becoming Cherrie, the director Nicky Larkin made the decision to have the drag queen stare directly at the camera, and deliver verbatim the abusive messages Cavan had received after the Belfast Telegraph interview. Using Cherrie as a cipher, he can deal back out what was dealt to him.

Those opening moments of Becoming Cherrie are indeed startling. It goes on to show Cavan transforming into Cherrie at a dressing table, and walking around an inhospitable version of Belfast, against audio clips of conservative politicians making disparaging remarks about the LGBTQ+ community. There seems little option for Cherrie but to be a rebel. A subsequent TV documentary produced by the BBC did succeed in zooming out onto a wider world of sympathetic characters, and followed Cavan as he spoke with medical experts and activists to map the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

It was this programme that caught the attention of Janice Kernoghan-Reid, the artistic director of Replay Theatre, an industrious company making plays for young audiences. “There’s a great narrative in Matt’s life. I had one eye open for the next show in our post-primary stream. There will definitely be kids in our audiences who want to come out, who think they are gay and can’t tell anybody, or just think drag is class. It would be really great to connect with those kids through Matt’s story,” she says.

The conversations that led to Mirrorball began in 2019, but the musical’s arrival comes after an unexpected period of upheaval. Last July, a group of people carrying placards saying “Parents Against Grooming” protested outside the MAC arts centre in Belfast, where Cherrie was doing a Drag Storytime reading. On Twitter, Cavan described a wave of abuse that he encountered after the incident, ranging from woeful insults to threats of violence. Among those using social media to organise the gathering was former Traditional Unionist Voice councillor Jolene Bunting, against whom Cavan took court proceedings.

The last time he came under fire like that, Cavan went off the grid for three years. He sounds averse to confrontation: “I was severely bullied as a kid, like many queer people. I am not that outgoing a person, so I don’t snap back at people.” This time, he is determined not to go away. He will keep making art.

The protest at the MAC follows the pattern of similar conflicts in other jurisdictions, where Drag Storytime events have been disrupted by far-right groups such as the Proud Boys in the US, while unfounded accusations of child grooming have become common among conservative activists and in the gender-critical movement. (On Irish shores, a parallel incident happened during Mayo Pride Festival, where a video surfaced of a protestor questioning the presence of drag queen Panti Bliss at a Drag Storytime event. “I’ve clearance to tell you to go f**k yourself,” responded Panti).

Queer historians will be quick to trace the history of the LGBT grooming conspiracy theory back to previous eras, to flashpoints such as Anita Byrant’s cynical “Save Our Children” campaign in the ‘70s. Nowadays, its advocates are seen at protests or posting on social media, trying to spread a moral panic among other adults. For a child-centric concept, its proponents almost never sound like they are communicating to children – something that practitioners in theatre for young audiences can be very good at.

“Kids are really curious, and we want them to draw their own conclusions,” says Kernoghan-Reid. It’s tempting to perceive a tension between competing ideas in the production, as if a children’s play were trying to counteract a conspiracy theory. “Maybe kids have heard the opinions spoken by the same people who give Matt abuse. When people are on opposite sides of the spectrum, it is easy to demonise others – maybe people who haven’t met a gay person are afraid. This is a way of opening doors,” she says.

To make a musical for an adolescent audience, Cavan admits to having to step outside his normal taste and habits. “I listen to Elaine Page on BBC Radio 2. I watch musicals and American crime dramas, and drink a lot coffee,” he confesses. He used the high-concept entertainments grasped by his nephew as references: the video edit-whirls of TikTok, the “Multiverse” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the “Upside Down” of Stranger Things. (The synth music of the latter became a touchstone for Garth McConaghie, the musical’s composer).

He discussed his story ideas with the musical’s co-writer Patrick J O’Reilly – he had adored O’Reilly’s 2018 play The Man Who Fell to Pieces, a surprisingly upbeat depiction of personal trauma – and one idea they landed on were these human-like machines characters called the Narrow Minders, who want to take Cherrie’s creativity away from her.

One way Cavan has summed up his adversaries over the years is by their disdain for liberalism and mediums like drag and theatre. After all, we live in a world where people read art opinions like they contain political dogma: show me your viewing history on Netflix, and I will tell you exactly who you are.

“Those people who abused me want to suck the creativity out of others, because they realise creativity makes people way too liberal for them, and not fit into the world that they want,” says Cavan. In that respect, the multiverse of Mirrorball sounds not unlike our own world, where art and self-acceptance also seem at stake.

Mirrorball opens at Lyric Theatre on 10th March, as part of Belfast’s Childrens Festival