Homo Promos is London’s oldest queer community theatre company. It was founded in 1988 in response to Section 28, which forbade local authorities from Promoting Homosexuality. When founder Peter Scott-Presland saw that phrase, he thought ‘What a great name for a theatre company!’
Since then HP, as it’s known, has produced over 20 plays, musicals, concerts and cabarets, often working in collaboration with other groups. The latest is a cycle of 16 one-act operas covering the entire gay history of the 20thcentury from the double death of Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria within three months of each other, to the first civil partnership register in London in 2001. For anyone whose toes curl up at the mention of opera, Peter assures us that “these are short, mainly under an hour, fast moving, with strong plots, sometimes moving, sometimes funny, but always dramatic.”
Now, in the lockdown, it has come up with a great use for these. Deprived of a theatre, and unable to use Robert Ely’s music for them, HP has nevertheless turned the libretti [words] into little plays which will be read and put out on Zoom every Tuesday night from April 28th to June 23rd. Two a week, one at 8pm and one at 9pm.
The plays are mostly about gay men, because that’s what Peter knows; some of them are about public figures, some are private. Where the plays draw on conventional history, they come at it from surprising angles. Who knew, for example, that the Irish Crown Jewels were stolen by members of a secret sado-masochistic homosexual cabal in Dublin Castle? Or that Ivor Novello, the Andrew Lloyd-Webber of the 1920s and 30s, was sent to prison for fiddling his petrol coupons and shared a cell with ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, a psychopathic henchman of the Kray Twins? The AIDS pandemic is here, in a science fiction dystopia, and the well-known Thorpe/Scott film noir drama is told from the point of view of the dogs involved, Mrs Tish and Rinka, both of whom died in the course of it. There are others about queer parenting and about gays in the military.
A Hundred Years of Gay Life is Here! Come and sample it, and take your mind off the present.
If you would like to eavesdrop in the audience, please email [email protected] to get the password to enter the room. This is a precaution against hacking.
TWO QUEENS: 1900: Two Queens April 28th, 8pm
QUEEN VICTORIA visits OSCAR WILDE on his deathbed. She too is near death. They discover that they have more in common than they thought. Including the fact that they will each be a much-misunderstood pillar of the epic struggle between repression and liberation through the next century.
1907: THE JEWELS – A VAUDEVILLE OF VENGEANCE April 28th, 9pm
FRANK SHACKLETON, the explorer’s brother, plots to steal the Irish Crown Jewels, to finance his brother’s expedition. The Jewels are guarded by SIR ARTHUR VICKERS, a masochistic queen that Frank seduced. When the theft occurs, a chase follows across Europe; the king, EDWARD VII, watches, furious. Meanwhile in Paris ROBERT ROSS is moving Oscar to his posh new grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery….
Details from [email protected]
