Full Captions: Radical Rediscovery 2 – Homosexual Acts and Beyond

Run by a triumvirate of gay men, Giles Havergal, Artistic Director from 1969 to 2009, designer Philip Prowse and creative partner Robert David MacDonald, the Citz became known for its vibrant restagings of the classics and dazzling visual vocabulary,  radical pricing policy. The cover shows Havergal in a version of Death in Venice.

The company was founded in 1980 by Angelique Rockas to perform international work and classics. One of their advisers was Athol Fugard. Performed at Theatre Space and The Park Theatre, Battersea Park.

Described as ‘both mincing and robust’ in a show that married the Punch and Judy tradition with that of English pantomime and his unique version of camp in a way that appealed to both adults and children.
From Alex Harding/David Thompson Collection, Bishopsgate Institute

This was the first British production of this surreal play that was directed by Stratford’s Artistic Director Philip Hedley (1938-2024) in defiance of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, banning the promotion of homosexuality.

The season at Inter-Action’s Almost Free Theatre by the newly-formed Gay Sweatshop was extended several times by popular demand with additional plays put on at the nearby Duke of Argyle pub, with Martin Sherman’s Passing By being added, which featured a young Simon Callow, and Lawrence Collinson’s play about the dilemma of being a gay playwright.

The first collection of gay plays to be published in Britain, it was brought out by the publishing arm of Inter-Action, one of many branches of the influential community arts organisation.

‘When gays say they have to be ‘discreet’, they support the idea that homosexuality – our homosexuality – is offensive… External oppression we can only fight against; self-oppression we can tear out and destroy’. The major inspiration for Mister X.

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

The first play to be toured by the newly-formed Gay Sweatshop it was written by Roger Baker, one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front and Drew Griffiths, who performed in it along with Alan Pope, Phillip Howells and Gordon McDonald. Devised in part and based on the book With Downcast Gays, it explores the journey of a drag artist, brilliantly played by Griffiths, and his journey from self-loathing through anger to self-respect and liberation.

Designed by Paul Dart, aimed at teenagers confronting their sexuality it dealt particularly with a gay teenage girl’s experience of coming out. Presented by Royal Court Youth Theatre it was well-received by school students but caused controversy with adults and was banned from many schools. The publicity sheet has been hand-typed and corrected with liquid paper.
From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

The working party was Kate Crutchley, Noel Greig, Martin Humphries, Caroline Mylon, Eric Presland and Lorraine Trenchard. Their 11 recommendations included that an annual ‘gay budget’ be made available for arts and community work including an All-London Lesbian and Gay Festival throughout 1983, culminating in a large-scale Gay Pride event.

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

Following its use as the title of the first Gay Theatre season at Inter-Action’s Almost Free Theatre, Gay Sweatshop kept the name for its first season of plays at the ICA and on tour: Jill Posener’s Any Woman Can and Drew Griffiths’s Mister X and Ian Brown’s The Fork.

Indiscreet was a sequel to the iconic Mister X.

The Age of Consent, played as part of a season for schools at the Royal Court, where Gerald Chapman ran the Young People’s theatre scheme, directed by Kate Crutchley and designed by Mary Moore, called ‘Everyone Different’. It addressed the impact of the age of consent – then 21 – on relationships and on gay teenagers. The press responded with ‘Children in Sex Play’ headlines and attempts to ban it.

Devised collectively with Ella Wilder, Eileen Dixon, Sara Hardy, Kate Jasonsmith and Francia White it included a crash course in feminist lesbian consciousness raising – presented by a fairy godmother. Its tour included shows for the Gay Teachers’ Group in London and Bristol Gay Festival

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

Details include that over 10,000 people saw the seven plays staged and that the initial 9 weeks had been extended to 19, that they had run an informal counselling centre in the theatre’s coffee bar and that they had toured to the Mickery Theatre in the Netherlands. The document continues on the rear with a policy statement.

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

Griffiths was a key figure in the company, involved in many of their early shows as performer or co-writer, the company was run from his flat in Balham. Brutally murdered in 1984, a case still unsolved, his death marked an endpoint of a first period of the company’s work.
Lent by Sue Frumin

Lent by Sue Frumin

Collectively devised by a mixed company, the piece explored environmental destruction the rise of fascism and the daily oppression of women and Gays, among other themes

Described in the Oval House leaflet, as ‘with words and music from rock to Reggae, Blues to bossa nova I Like Me Like This considers the contrast between the image and the reality of lesbians in society. ‘Will Society ever discover what lesbianism is really about? Can the media portray the lesbian lifestyle without blinkers?
Lent by Than Hussein Clark

With limited resources, publicity sometimes had to be handmade. Denise Speight found her talent as working-class student through The General Will’s community season and went on to write and direct numerous shows locally.

Don Milligan is a leftist activist and a gay man who joined with Noel Greig to write Men, which addressed anti-gay prejudice in the organised Left. He went on to become an academic.

Earlier policy statement of The General Will as an agit-prop company on the revolutionary left. ‘We intervene in potentially liberal questions i.e. racism, women, homosexuality etc. but define our own revolutionary attitude to these questions.’

‘From the Garden of Eden to the Equal Pay Act – in song, dialogue and dance, with Adam being encouraged by God to be more dominant in the relationship and couples encouraged to consume more. Developed with a local group of 6 women and 3 men.

Celtic Delilight was one of the many offshoots of The General Will: members Gerard McLaughlin and Bobby Weaver were founders. The play ‘challenges the audience to come off the fence about Northern Ireland and stop believing it is somebody else’s responsibility’.

This poster shows the process involved in creating publicity in the 1970s, using Letraset rub-down or pasted up letters that could then be printed from or possibly photocopied. Additional information such as specific venues was then often handwritten or pasted on a strip to update the poster.

A cabaret-style show, drawing on popular culture, it was devised by the company where earlier shows had been scripted, usually by David Edgar.

Countering Noel Greig’s initial wish to transform the company into a gay theatre group, the company resolved eventually rather than a permanent performing group of 5 or 6 people the company instead would offer a ‘pool’ of ‘people in the town with experience in theatre who are willing to work with community groups, who wish to use theatre as a means of depicting their experiences.’

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

Davidson photographed numerous activist events and theatre performances in the area in the 70s and 80s.

‘..Some of us have grown exceeding retired of our daily portion of abuse of the constant denial of our rights to live and breathe as women and people possessing integrity. Therefore we got very angry with your abuse of us at a party’.

‘The sweeping analysis behind the writing challenges male chauvinism in general, and that of the English Left in particular. Nobody interested in politics should miss it’

The need for men to address their internalised sexism and assumptions of male dominance was a key challenge levelled at them in the context of the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, which some addressed by establishing organisations and networks.

Including reviews of Present Your Briefs on gays and the law on tour to Liverpool and I Just Don’t Like Apples.

1.Poster for Sappho and Aphrodite by Karen Malpede, Character Ladies, 1987

Directed by Kate Crutchley at Oval House, this was the first British production of an American play written in lyric poetry about the classic Greek lesbian poet it  touches on sexual jealousy and mother-daughter antagonisms. Character Ladies was established by Crutchley with Susan Hayes and Dee Berwick.

Initially an actor who joined Gay Sweatshop in 1977 for As Time Goes By, his and Greig’s relationship became central to both personally and also in the development of the company. Osment went on to write, direct and become the company’s first historian, writing and editing Gay Sweatshop: Four Plays and a Company (Methuen, 1989). He died in 2019.

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections.

Staged at St Paul’s Church, Deptford, near where Marlowe died in a tavern brawl, Noel Greig’s play was directed by Philip Osment after being developed with students from Rose Bruford College who set up their own company to stage the play. It was later staged in Winnipeg, Canada by Libby Mason.

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections.

A musical version of Freeman’s 1988 piece The Ladies of the Vale, about lesbian ‘desire, devotion and determination’ in 18th Century society the play explored the lives of the ladies of Llangollen, focusing on their meeting and elopement together, and mixing romance and comedy. It was directed by Kate Crutchley.

Cast was Fraser Caines, Kate Corkery, Kate Crutchley, Mandy More

Freeman’s first version of the Ladies of Llangollen subject matter, it focused on ‘a lesbian couple’s relationship with each other and with patriarchal society’ as well as their relationship as aristocratic Irishwomen with their Welsh-speaking gardener and their ladies’ maid.

The cast was Hazel Carey, Illona Linthwaite, Hisae Matsuda, Stephanie Pugsley and Adele Saleem

The play involved an exploration of classical myth, Sappho’s original poems, Malpede’s verse text and an appropriate theatrical language to carry a sense of ritual.

Staged by Theatre Rhinoceros, one of several successful productions of Greig’s play which was also staged in Australia and Germany. Based on the life and writings of gay Edwardian socialist, feminist, vegetarian, political and cultural activist Edward Carpenter whose writings fed into the ferment of new thought at the turn of the 19^th century. The play explores his relationships with working class men and his attempts to live out his political ideals. Greig’s artistic collaboration with Drew Griffiths also included As Time Goes By and the television play Only Connect.

Originally produced by The Combination at the Albany Empire in 1980, Angels Descend on Paris was revived by Rose Bruford College students. It dealt with the treatment of gays under fascism in the 1930s and how racial and sexual differences previously accepted within a civilised liberalism, become unacceptable under totalitarian regimes. The play was directed by American director Nancy Diuguid, one of Greig’s key collaborators and a key individual in British lesbian and gay theatre, after studying at Central School of Speech and Drama with Julie Parker.

As Time Goes By was the first Sweatshop play to engage with the larger history of repression of homosexuality in connection with social and political control of the workforce through the imposition of uniformity and stamping out of liberal values. The cast was Gordon MacDonald, Alan Pope, Drew Griffiths and Philip Howells. It was very successful, including on tour to Germany.

Greig’s play revisits history through the characters of two ‘Mouldy Heads’, long dead in twentieth century or earlier wars, mourning the loss of their bodies. It was a ‘state of the nation’ play connecting gay politics with the larger political context of threat, militarism and hyper-masculinity.

Described as an ‘epic comedy’ this piece drew on panto, Brechtian techniques, high camp, kitchen-sink drama in a multi-style spoof that reflected on itself as a piece of theatre while reworking Euripides The Bacchae!

Greig’s play with Alex Harding’s music on tour to Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent and the Education College at Alsager in South Cheshire.

From Rose Bruford College, Special Collections

Isabel Miller was the pen-name of Alma Routsong (1924-1996) who used it in publishing her lesbian fiction. Patience and Sarah originally appeared as A Place for Us  and was based on relationship between the folk painter Mary Ann Willson and Florence Brundage in 182 0s USA.

Directed by Kate Crutchley and adapted by Joyce Holliday who Kate had met while working at Stoke-on-Trent. Charting the growing love between two pioneer women in 19th century America, its central roles were performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of Split Britches theatre company.

The company came together to create a revue-style production, the success of which encouraged them to stay together, extending one sketch Ophelia into a full-length play by Melissa Murray, directed by Sue Dunderdale, a gender-queer version of Shakespeare’s play in which Ophelia runs away with her maid. It was published in the first Radical Rediscovery anthology edited by Susan Croft, Montez Press, 2025.

The play ‘traced 500 years in the life of a bag-lady… who became a fool at the Elizabethan court. She was a highwaywoman, a suffragette-representative of the group’s fantasies… all women who went against convention’ (Sandra Freeman). Red Rag was set up in 1987 by drama graduates of University of Kent.

Scripted by Tierl Thompson and Libby Mason based on letters exchanged by a group of young working-class women from the 1890s onwards in East London, caught up in the ferment of social and sexual change and the causes of socialism and feminism. Tierl Thompson also edited two of the women’s letters for The Women’s Press. Women’s Theatre Group continues to operate as Sphinx.

The play details their involvement in the suffrage movement. The letters were published, edited by Tierl Thompson by The Women’s Press, 1987

Sue Frumin’s The Housetrample is a one-woman show based on the experience of her Jewish refugee mother and the close friend she left behind in Czechoslovakia when the Nazis invaded.

The show was described as a highly visual cabaret-theatre show, expressing ‘in music, scene and song, the survival and resistance of Lesbian and Gay people from the thirties to the present day’. New Heart company included Stephen Gee, Noel Greig, Gordon McDonald, Stephanie Pugsley, Philip Timmins from: Gay Sweatshop, Hormone Imbalance, Brixton Faeries and Sexual Outlaws.

Bunyan was building a career as a successful cabaret artist in the late 70s and early 80s with an effective press campaign that has him featuring regularly in news items in Gay News. The addition to the poster was Theatre Space’s, presumably with Bunyan’s agreement!

Several of the early Pride marches were organised by the gay community in the licensed squats in Railton Rd and its neighbouring streets that became part of Brixton Housing Co-op. Increasingly they featured art and performance events.
From Rose Bruford College Special Collections.

A version of Dracula offering ‘a unique exploration into the nocturnal worlds of our sub-conscious’ ‘What is the body beneath? Horror, nothing but bloody mad horror’

Presland writes that the play, his first, was a cross between Agatha Christie and George Bernard Shaw, set in a hybrid Oxbridge, exploring what was ,radical beneath its conservative format… in its clear-eyed assessment of the gay scene and how gay men relate to each other; our sexual opportunism, sexual uncertainties and even physical difficulties’. A young Richard Coles was part of the cast.

Specifically: In Watching Ms Mary or The Gaps. Designed and directed by Ernst Fischer, Described as a ‘sketch for a Future Living Room Opera project’.
Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

Seesaw was originally performed in 1980 at the Rio in Dalston by two men, though written for two women, but with deliberately androgynous names. Based on an actual 1970s event where members of the GLF went up to Hampstead Heath to confront the cruisers with the shallowness of their lifestyles, equipped with  a teatrolley to offer refreshment! A reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream it was first performed on the Heath at midsummer in 1981.

First British production of American playwright Jane Chambers, one of the first playwrights to write of lesbianism as simply a given in romantic comedies. The US Women in Theatre programme’s Playwriting Award, is still given in Chamber’s name in recognition of her writing and involvement in writers’ organisations and gay activism.

Ó Clúbhán wrote several other plays with Irish Gay Theatre Group in London. Performer Jim MacSweeney still works at Gay’s the Word bookshop. Ó Clúbhán was a founder member of Brixton Faeries, having become part of the South London Gay Liberation Front in 1973. ‘As gay men we are cut off from the Irish community and as Irish men in the white/English identified gay sub-culture we feel the pressure to anglify and go ‘West Brit’. In this play we explore this racism while the unacknowledged war goes on’.
Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

‘Laura Normil is a lesbian she is also dead but how did she die? Where will she end up since there is no heaven and hell God in the blue corner and Satan in the pink corner debate, argue and lay bets on Laura’s future with them’
Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

Theatre Space’s annual street theatre programme also took place in other venues local to its base in William IV St off the Strand, including for the first time in 1982 a programme of work at the gay nightclub Heaven.

As well as its nautical theme, apt given its proximity to the river, and featuring of performers like Inter-Action’s Captain Cook ‘Community Cameo’ Cruising took on an additional resonance with Theatre Space’s 1982 festival…

Originally presented in Out in Lambeth as a rehearsed reading called ‘I Bet You Can’t’ ‘I Bet I Will’ : ‘Four gay men share a house. It is their last night together. Passions rumble through the night as love and troubles are revealed and concealed.’

Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

Performed by James Neale-Kennerley and Clive Simpson The Risk was about two men formerly lovers meeting again and confronting old dreams and nightmares and the possibility of building a new relationship.

Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

To mark the company’s tenth anniversary, the festival staged 16 new plays as works-in-progress, several  of which went on to have full productions.

The company advertised for plays for the planned GSx10 Festival to mark their tenth anniversary and published a pamphlet with Mister X and Any Woman Can to encourage new writers’ responses.
From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

Harry, Ken, Laurie and Vince have shared a house for 3 years. It’s their last night together before each follows his separate Destiny…
Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

Described as ‘a group gay men: Peter Bradley, Colm Ó Clúbhán and Nigel Young – all living near one another around Brixton. They have performed stories and poetry about our lives in Brixton Art gallery and they wish to entertain, amuse…jolt…’

Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Jonathan Blake /Nigel Young Collection

Programmed by Theatre Space to include pieces that had also been performed at their space in William IV Street. Franz’s starting points were ‘humble nudity, a stock of colourful tights and sharp tools to destruct them, presents for the audience, six erotic tales plus anything that comes to his or the audience’s minds.’

Alex Harding was an administrator, writer and composer with Gay Sweatshop, later became musical director of the Bloolips Theatre Company creating his drag character ‘Dotty’. He moved to Australia where he had a further successful career in theatre. He died in 2022

A three-week long festival it was crowded with workshops, talks and performances and laid the groundwork for The Drill Hall’s future as a performance space with a special relationship to LGBTQ+ work.

From Rose Bruford Special Collections

Produced by gay production company D.E.T Enterprises (from David E. Thompson, partner of Alex Harding) in conjunction with political theatre group Belt and Braces, the play focused on a successful northern gay working-class actor, played by Drew Griffiths, and his interior struggle to reconcile his life in permissive London with the pressures of returning home to deal with his father’s death.

Loan from Bishopsgate Institute Alex Harding /David Thompson Collection

The season grew out of the network of gay companies based around Oval House, including Brixton Faeries, Pink Faeries and others. The workshop was based on John Rechy’s novel The Sexual Outlaw.

From Rose Bruford College Special Collections

Directed by Kate Crutchley, scripted from interviews and a devising process by the company on the custody struggles of lesbian mothers. This was the subject that audience members at their first show Any Woman Can (1976) wanted the company to address most urgently.

Griffins’ influential piece interweaves poetic monologues of five women of different ages describing their stories.

Growing out of a project at the Half Moon Young People’s Theatre that, led by Elly Wilkie of Graeae, explored the possibility of an integrated multiracial company of performers with Disabilities and the able-bodied, and explored the negative words we us to self-describe: invalid, worthless, useless… and the demands of the perfect body, perfect job, perfect marriage…

Featuring songs from From the Divine (1982), Mama’s Gone A’ Hunting (1980) and Curfew (1982)

Set onboard a British rail train carrying a secret cargo of nuclear waste, Now Wash Your Hands, Please satirises Tory politics of the 1980s and encourages a confrontation with the ‘crisis of perception’ which traps us in a ‘limited rigid perspective’ where a ‘dynamic, interrelating worldview’ is needed.

Scripted by Burgess the play was based on the life of Tasha Fairbanks as a working-class lesbian growing up in Whitechapel. Well-reviewed, it was described in The Times as charting ‘the adventures of a mutinous nine year-old to her emergence as a liberated lesbian squatter…’ Sidewalk were a community theatre company initially formed in Islington and later based in Matthias Rd, Hackney.

Curfew explores women’s relationships to each other and to the state in an oppressive regime where they have been forced to survive on the margins, through the encounter of a lesbian couple and a heterosexual feminist in a lesbian club forced underground.

The play was set in an inter-galactic court somewhere in the universe where a Man and a Woman defend themselves against the accusations of the other, it explored the invisibility of women in history. Siren grew out of the Brighton-based band Devil’s Dykes becoming a theatre company and lesbian-feminist band.

This show was a comic holiday resort murder mystery, directed by Kate Crutchley for her company Character Ladies. Gulliver’s spoof girls’ boarding school play, The Sister Mysteries, was also produced by the company.

Pope and Harding’s cabaret revue in which ‘Britain’s foremost authority on morality, telly and smutty stuff tells her own heartwarming story’. Sister Cilla’s frock was made by Paul Dart. The administrator was Harding’s partner David E. Thompson. Their archive is in Bishopsgate Institute.

McNair played Natalie Barney, Catti Calthrop Romaine Brooks and Adele Saleem, Dolly Wilde in McNair’s play exploring the lesbian world of fin de siècle Paris.

In which ‘Patricia Giltedge… having sold her soul to capitalism, is one frosty Christmas eve made to see the error of her ways through some ghastly encounters with ghosties, ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.’

Billed as an adaptation of Brecht and Gay’s Threepenny/Beggars’ Operas with a country and Western influence set at the Peach Humm Foundation for Fallen Angels and the lesbian underworld where Polly Peach-Humm falls for the notorious Maureen McHeath…

Oxford-based,Tattycoram was a women’s performance company who had also made shows about Mary Shelley, directed by Annie Griffin. Victoria Worsley played Tilly.

Wertenbaker’s play explored the lives of cross-dressing women of the late 19th century, explorer Isabelle Eberhardt and burlesque artiste Vesta Tilley, known for her performance as Burlington Bertie.

Orlando has been the source of many adaptations over the years including Sally Potter’s film with Tilda Swinton and Neil Bartlett’s stage version with Emma Corrin in the main part.

Performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, Hughes Obie award-winning play, laced with comedy and parody. explores the menacing and erotic territory of an obsessive butch-femme relationship.

Described as a Sapphic Sud-Saga: ‘Forget for a while the overdraft and the demise of the GLC and immerse yourself in steamy passion. There’s not a social worker in sight…not even a token heterosexual, but a world throbbing with primeval emotions, unprincipled women and thwarted desire’

‘The greatest love affair since Hepburn and Garland. A clash of the Amazons. The return of the Fifty Foot Women…’

Described as a lesbian farce, it was set in a women-only funeral parlour. It was directed by Saffron Myers.

Put on at Oval House with 17 women performers it led to a series of weekly meetings and thence to the formation of Hard Corps.

Written by Ray Dobbins, the cast of The Island of Lost Shoes was Bette Bourne, Lavinia Co-op, Bella, Harmony and Naughty Nickers  Under the artistic directorship of Julie Parker, the Drill Hall remained a key venue for LGBTQ+ work until its closure in 2012.

An all-male production with ‘wonderful frocks’ by Jonathan Blake.

Lucid Johnston was ‘a raw physical poem about drug use, drag use and life amongst the Queer tribes.’ Fine and Dandy told the epic tale of Ernest/ Ernestine Fine at the  turn of the 20th century. Trapped in a time warp and confused by her body…’

The programme reflected the playful approach of the production featuring a car that turned into a trunk, dolls and toy dogs.

The legendary Crisp (1908-1999) was self-described as ‘one of the stately homos of England.’

The late great Lindsay Kemp was an icon for numerous classic performances including in Flowers, Onnagata and Nijinsky. Salome also starred The Great Orlando.

Directed by Karen Parker, this was one of the popular lesbian pantomimes, regularly performed at the Oval House and at the Drill Hall at Christmas times, further subverting the anarchic potential of panto’s traditional cross-dressing and complete with numerous double-entendres. Here a young woman from the north of England brings her cat to London for a Gay Pride march but encounters a London where even the Lesbian Liberation Movement has been taken over by the devotees of Free Enterprise.

Also on the bill was Muff Diva with Lea De Laria, described as ‘the lesbian Lenny Bruce.’

The success of the 1975 TV adaptation starring John Hurt won Hurt a BAFTA and helped launch Crisp’s career as a performer in a series of one-person shows.

Formed in 1987 the company, the company aimed to promote the visibility of lesbian creativity but struggled to raise funds in the political climate after Section 28 became law.

From Bishopsgate Institute Alex Harding/David Thompson Collection

The leaflet was designed by Biff whose artwork repurposes the strip cartoons of girls’ romantic teen comics. Staged at the ICA Jingleball was a panto where the men’s and women’s companies came together for a lunchtime romp, revisiting the cliches of the genre. Drew Griffiths was instrumental in bringing the two companies together.

VITRINE 8

All lent from Bloolips Collections, Bishopsgate Institute

Reproduction Costume

Pannier skirts made of various fabrics including red and blue voile, sequinned voile, tinsel and silver crepe, given shape via two separate rectangular wire cage-like structures attached to each other with an elastic rope, originally created for the sketch ‘1812’ as performed in Bloo Revue: a Bloolips Retrospectacle (June 1998), and re-made by Precious Pearl for the 2019 exhibition.