Maxwell: Plays for Young People (Oberon Plays for Young People)

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The crunch came at work when I received a grim notification that I was to be positively vetted by the security services. The setting was awesome and intentionally intimidating. A grand room in the old India Office in Whitehall. There sat the Head of Whitehall security, flanked by two MI5 spooks in shabby suits. I carried on with my career.

Some may judge that this experience was mild compared to the horrors suffered by queer folk today, but at the time it brought home to me the uncomfortable fact that I was different, and always would be. Today, despite changes in the law, the dangers of Queerdom are worse than ever. As we know, in Chechnya queer men are slaughtered in concentration camps.

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In many countries they constantly live in the shadow of death and savage punishment. Leaders of the religious Right in America, that once liberal country, are calling for the mass extermination of queer folk. Instead, the play focuses on those anonymous queer men who leave home to face a hostile world on their own. Some of them stray into the drugs scene and may be swallowed up by it.

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The way I see it, queer folk must always find their happiness while living in Hell. The situation is a source of laughs and pitfalls. If you picked up a boy on the motorway who was out of his head on drugs, what would you do? Dump him on the hard shoulder or take him home?

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Stan takes him home. It is my sixth production going back to when Peacefully in his Sleep was produced at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill.

In fact, that was the first original play produced at the Gate, a decade before I founded Oberon Books, specialising in new plays. There were many obstacles over 32 years investing in and consolidating the company. This is not the time to record them, but the workload has certainly got in the way of my compulsion to write. But I wonder how different things might have been if I had not been hauled up before a Kangaroo Court in Whitehall. There was no evidence that I was spying for Russia. I was just queer. What began as a volume intended for auditioning actors, quickly became the first anthology of its kind, chronicling over one hundred years of Queer and Trans performance, including previously unknown and never-before-published works.

I came on board the project a few months after its inception. Oberon has a long list of monologue volumes for practitioners, such as Monologues for Black Actors , so a queer collection had been in the pipeline for quite a while. Once the book started to come together it became clear that we were no longer making just an audition toolkit, but. So we got rid of that — but it was a very interesting discussion to have.

Talk us through the decisions the team made about which significant queer plays to include in the collection, and why. There was a lot of back and forth on some of the better-known pieces, all boiling down to: Do we need to include this uber-popular, easily accessible play? We tried to create thought-provoking parallels with the pieces we chose — ie. We thought having them side by side offered an interesting look at differing experiences of the AIDS crisis in a mostly white New York setting versus that of a black British community. Neil Bartlett is another established writer whose work we were really keen to have — deeply political and in line with the themes of the collection.

Could you elaborate on the same process, but for less well-known plays? This is really where our core aim came into play — spotlighting voices that have been side-lined within the queer community itself. To get back to the Boy with Beer example: We put the anthology together by answering a lot of these questions. Could you take us through the reasons for going further afield than published plays or plays that have been produced?

Nye Produkter

Spoken word is where some of the most exciting stuff is happening! Think of cabaret and drag, for example, not just spoken word — queer performance blends it all together. Scottee and I have both been immersed in queer performance culture for years Scottee more than I, to be fair! Other than that, it was a lot of Googling and brainstorming. A lot of them were never published or have gone out of print. There were many sessions we spent scouring the British Library!

How hard was it to find queer playwrights or significant queer characters from early on the 20 th century? We went looking for mostly queer characters for the first half of the twentieth century — and even then, it was rare that those plays made. Plays like God of Vengeance and The Drag were even pulled from the stage, their writers and producers indicted on obscenity charges. Scottee brought so many cabaret, drag, radical queer artists to the table — it was so exciting to work with the ideas he had, to give a fully-fledged idea of how queer performance has evolved and what it looks like now.

Which is your favourite monologue and why?

Just some really evocative writing about an African-American butch woman — like, so good. I think they embody that playfulness and humanity about queer performance so well. Are there any plays that you wish you could have included? When I look at the collection knowing what happened behind the scenes I can spot a couple of glaring omissions — but we did all we could.

Fingers crossed for Vol 2. Peggy Ramsay was the foremost play agent of her time. Her list of clients shows her to have been at the centre of British playwriting for several generations from the late s on. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Not Enabled Word Wise: Not Enabled Screen Reader: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers.

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