A couple of years ago, drag queen, novelist, scholar, performance artist, and avant-garde playwright and director Neil Bartlett reflected in an interview on his provocative place in the theatrical firmament: “At times I think, Why do I have this compulsion toward deliberate vuglarity, pushing things a little bit too far, which is going to guarantee that the work is indigestible to some people?” The British director, along with most of his collaborative production ensemble “Gloria,” came to town recently to push Chicago’s theatrical limits, inflicting their difficult and gaudy vision on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the Goodman Theatre.
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The 33-year-old Bartlett–self-confident, sometimes brusque, aggressively intellectual–is a current fave of the British postmodern theater scene; his work includes Gloria’s acclaimed production of A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, the story of Victorian artist and poet Simeon Solomon, who was prosecuted for having sex with a man in a public toilet in 1873. (In the play, Bartlett himself appeared starkers, as the British say, alongside a phalanx of drag queens.) But he’s also a well-received novelist and translator, particularly of Racine and Moliere.
Bartlett claims not to have read any of the reviews, but he says he wasn’t surprised at the reaction. “For ten years people have been writing about us, calling us fools, idiots, outrageous. We come to theater through a devious route, out of performance art and something we call ‘devised theater,’ the creation of a collaboration of a number of people from different artistic disciplines, not based on a literary reading of a text.”
“I think people heard that we were English,” says Bartlett, “and expected something from the Royal Shakespeare Company, circa 1984. A lot of it has to do with people’s expectations. If I said to someone that I was doing a show at the Goodman and that the show involved cross-dressing, homosexuality, and extremely repressed homosexual mania, included big song-and-dance numbers, 40 costume changes, and a continuous musical score, and that the theme of the play was the politics of gender, they’d say, My god, you’re doing that at the Goodman?”
In other instances, Bartlett says, he simply substituted modern epithets for the classical ones, replacing, for example, “Go shake your ears” with “Go fuck yourself.” “The phrase probably means, ‘Go suck yourself off,’” says Bartlett. “Now, does ‘Go shake your ears’ make you laugh?”
“The Three Sisters is very much like The Cherry Orchard, and one Tennessee Williams play is much like another; they come out of a period of literary theater. But I don’t think that The Comedy of Errors is very much like Julius Caesar, so what does it mean to do a Shakespeare play?”
He answers himself sarcastically, “‘No, let’s just have a man and a woman.’
