SEXUAL POLITICS This year’s Glasgay! programme is stronger than ever, but as the festival has grown in cultural importance it has attracted new levels of criticism and controversy that now threaten to undermine its purpose. Kirstin Innes meets Steven Thomson, the director of Glasgay!, to talk about censorship, activism and festival’s role in mainstream culture
G lasgay!’s director Steven Thomson has always conceived his role as a balancing act: creating a programme that includes experimental work by LGBT artists, while pulling in as broad an audience as possible to take the festival out of a niche and into the mainstream.
‘It’s important to me to look at how our culture intersects or interrelates with mainstream culture,’ he says. ‘We don’t do quirky live art for forty people: we’ve got an audience of over 30,000 with half a million pounds of economic impact on the community.’ No doubt about it Glasgay! is an increasingly huge force on Scotland’s cultural scene, and their 2007 SAC award of ongoing flexible funding has increased Thomson’s ability to work with playwrights and directors on the kind of work he wants well in advance, to set themes in motion over a period of years. ‘Families have been at the core of our programme for a while now. I began to notice it during Tennessee Williams season last year, and of course families are so central to his work. This year, I’ve begun to think, right, we’re in the 21st century now, at the end of the first decade; it’s time to bring this notion of the queer family bang up to date and look at dysfunctional family in a contemporary context. And this year, you can see the first results of our funding award.
‘I’ve been able to take a writer like Martin O’Connor, who we refer to as our “queer- identified straight artist” (his work looks at gender and masculinity from the underdog position and that resonates with an LGBT audience), and get him to look at certain themes that have cropped up in the Tennessee Williams season, and produce a new work that
TALKING HEADS Kirstin Innes talks to six of the playwrights who’ve created new pieces around the ideas of ‘family’ and ‘the feminine’ for Glasgay! 2009
24 THE LIST 24 Sep–8 Oct 2009
Novelist Louise Welsh worked closely with Glasgay! while writing
Memory Cells ‘Memory Cells might
just be my most full-on piece. I’ve always liked the underground, rumbly quality of the Arches, and it helped inspire the setting of the play, an old nuclear shelter where Cora lives alone, except from visits from Barry. Barry and Cora’s relationship is initially ambiguous. Is he her lover, father, jailer or carer? The couple’s verbal tarantella uncovers what they are to each other, and why the young woman is compelled to live beneath the earth. I wrote Memory Cells with two top Scottish actors in mind, Tam Dean Burn and Kirstin Mclean. They’re both strong, adaptable, brave artists, which was essential. Memory Cells is not for the faint-hearted. I had nightmares when I was writing it and I’m hoping it’ll inspire a sleepless night or two in the audience. After all, no one likes to suffer alone.’ ■ The Arches, Tue 20–Sat 24 Oct.
Martin O’Connor’s Playing Houses looks at a family falling apart on a Big Brother eviction night
‘My last couple of shows [Reality, part of last
year’s Glasgay!, and Inner Circle, performed on the Glasgow Subway] have made me realise the importance of reflecting modern life back onto an audience without pretension or patronisation. It’s important for me to try to create authentic characters that are based on the way we live now, in this city, coping with all the things that modern Scottish life throws at us. The show is deliberately lo-fi: I’m focusing on storytelling and creating something that’s intimate and conversational. I want each audience member to feel like they are being spoken to one-to-one, over a pint or at the kitchen table. It’s about inviting people in and showing them a familiar, localised situation and then going with them on a journey to somewhere else that can help to educate and inspire.’ ■ The Arches, Tue 13–Sat 17 Oct.