A riotous rainbow | Original artwork by Doug Crossley
Between the Riot and the Rainbow
"brutal and funny in turns with a burning, plangent heart”
— Alexi Kaye Campbell, Playwright (The Pride)
Genre: Theatre / Drama
Running time: Approx 120 mins
Cast: David (late 60s), Lynne (50s), Ben (20s), Conor (20s) & Adam (20s)
Synopsis
Set between Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, and London, this is a drama about belonging. It explores recovery from sexual trauma through the experience of a gay man. When a sexual encounter leads him to an anonymous sex party, under the influence of drugs he doesn’t remember taking, Adam commits a criminal act. A series of confrontations follow that force him to meet his shame: privately, legally, in his family and ultimately in the middle of the night with his brother who stands naked next to him on a train station platform. A story about empathy, and reclaiming what we’ve lost, asking if we can escape a legacy of shame?
History
Originally selected as part of the PlayWROUGHT Festival of new writing at the Arcola Theatre, London. This script was one of five finalist scripts for The Mercury Weinberger playwriting prize and shortlisted for BBC Studios Writers Academy, Writersroom (Drama), and Verity Bargate Award (Soho Theatre). Performance rights are available and I’m very interested in developing this as a TV format.
Read a sample scene here.
Adam (protagonist) meets Conor for the first time. It’s the outcome of their meet that serves as catalyst for the events that follow.
Ideas Playground
I didn’t grow up thinking I could write things like plays. Kids from my neck of the woods didn’t really do things like that. So, when I found out I could, this was the play I, “always wanted to write”. For a long time now I’ve been interested in, and am increasingly educated on, trauma and its effects. In particular, how it is inherited, and how much our history informs our present by how it’s quite literally stored in the fibre of our being. I built this story from a seedling of wanting to explore the notion of elders in the gay community, and how it’s possible that, as a result of our social subjugation, gay men have sexualised intergenerational exchange rather than realise more meaningful developmental bonds. It then built on a “thesis”, for want of a better word, that, as a community, we haven’t so much made progress in our community as we have ingested the shame and marginalisation we have historically suffered. So, we live now between the riots that liberated us and the fantasy rainbow ideal that is yet to be revealed.
My friend Matthew Todd (author of, “Straight Jacket”) created this segment for Newsnight, in which I feature, that discusses lots of the themes present in the play.
Patrick Strudwick wrote a long-read article which eloquently and compassionately explores the necessity for navigation and “alternative” location seeking within the gay community. Read it here.
