All the world's a stage
But not for doing drag shows
Did Oliver Cromwell come back from the dead? Warts and all?
This article is dedicated to Gé Doedijns, Rocky Osaer, Patrick Pierre and Andres De Blust (who can currently be seen on Belgian tv, apparently, in RuPaul’s Drag Race thing (RTBF)).
Not one of them will be able to comprehend any more than can I how we have arrived at the stage where parody and plain foolish fun can land you in court on a criminal charge.
Thursday saw me with some friends at a performance of a Shakespeare play: The Tempest, at the Jacques Franck Cultural Centre in Brussels (there are still tickets if you’re interested). My lodger, Kurt, was thereby at his very first ever live performance of Shakespeare in English, or, indeed, any tongue, and, in preparation for this induction, I’d suggested he look up the synopsis of the play on the web, just to prepare for the brave new world about to pass before his eyes and ears. So, he spent all afternoon watching academic analyses on Youtube (I said “prepare”, not render the whole flipping outing a total waste of time ... technical, he is, y’know, a bolt’s a bolt for all that, sort of thing).
Upon emerging after the show, we all agreed it’d been a good performance. Kurt raised a point of information, however, that technical mind of his whirring away with little unnoticed facts that had sprung to his mind over the hour and a half of trying to read the thing in French from the top of the pross arch: “I feel it’s not authentic Shakespeare,” he said, “There were women in the cast and the academic authorities say that women did not play in the time of William Shakespeare.” I told him that with 20 roles to fill on average and twice as many female thespians than male fancying their chances, he was lucky there were any men on stage at all, and we could happily pass on that little aspect of authenticity — from 1580!
But he’s right, of course. Back in the 17th century, under the rules laid down by the Lord Chamberlain, acting was a male preserve in England, with male actors dressing up as women parts, like Mistress Quickly and various queens (you get the flavour of what it was like (before the Gillette(R) razor had been invented, to boot) in the film Shakespeare in Love - Judi Dench is the queen in that one). What a silly rule that was: prohibiting women from acting in stage plays, and making men dress up as women, and boys as girls. Stupid! But that’s how it was.
Just as very stupid as the exact reversal they now seem to be living in parts of America. That it should be a criminal felony, the same penalty as awaited a woman who trod the boards in Elizabethan England: the most serious of all criminal categories, for donning a dress and — well, doing what? Perpetrating a fraud? Impersonating the First Lady? Cheating the blind blind? No: entertaining. Deploying stage craft and ex tempore improvisation skills to make the world a funnier place. To make us laugh and feel good. Well, Mr Barry Humphries, I expect that your Dame Edna alter ego may just be a little curtailed in her more extravagant euphemisms? Put that in your gladioli and smoke it! Is pantomime to be outlawed for an Annie Lennox-style s-s-s-s-se-se-se-sex crime, besides being booed off stage for plain bad jokes and hammy acting? Thank goodness Dames Hilda Bracket and Evadne Hinge have already well quit that line of hilarity — Patrick Fyffe would be turning in his grave (and probably insisting it’s centre stage before he moves so much as a finger). I never was entirely sure whether Danny LaRue was in drag or just a very flamboyant dresser, but he’s safely in the past as well, at least. And the Tennessee law cuts both ways, as well: Violet Carson’s embodiment of Ena Sharpels in Granada’s Coronation Street was a woman harder than a Kellingly Colliery seam-face miner’s hob-nailed boots on a sticky wicket: she was Arthur Scargill and Fred Trueman poured into one never-smiling, uncompromising, round the wicket delivery: you may have had Salford at your beck and call, Ena, but, in TN, Mrs Sharpels, you’d need to go, no mistake!
Well, all you drag queens out there in stageland: improvisation’s what you’re good at, is it? Then here’s an improvisation for you: in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, the protagonist, Rosalind, has a barney with the Duke, (Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste, and get you from our court) and wanders off with her best friend, Celia (O my poor Rosalind, whither wilt thou go?) into the forest of Arden, that’s where (To seek my uncle in the forest of Arden) - there, told you. We must remember all the while, that these two women in 1600 were played by two men, yes?
Celia suggests that, for personal security, it would be best if they dressed like guys. So, the two men, dressed as girls, now dress as guys. (What shall I call thee when thou art a man?). Oh, I dunno, anything - how about Ganymede? How about what??? (Rosalind at this point becomes known as Ganymede. It’s in the script.) Now, later in the play, Rosalind falls madly in love with Orlando, as you can imagine, in a boringly predictable way - with a boy who is, I can assure you, quite contrary to all pantomime tradition, a boy, dressed as a boy, playing a boy. In boy clobber. But no skateboard, as a rule. However, falling in love with a bloke when you’re dressed as a bloke is at best calculated to get you a sock on the chin. (Unless there’s a drag show going on somewhere close by, I guess.) This is awkward, when disguised as a bloke (Doth he know that I am in this forest and in man’s apparel?). No, Roz, but the audience do, if they’re keeping tabs as they should …
In order to woo the poet and get him wed to her before the last bus, this man, dressed as woman, dressed as man, will now “disguise” her—, I mean, himself as a woman again. I think. In the finest tradition of theatre, laid on with a trowel.
Now, as every drag artist must know, when you dress as the other sex, you don’t just dress as the other sex. You have to dress like this sex dressing like the other sex, so there’s a bit of As You Like It in every good drag queen (as if we didn’t know). After all, all the world is a stage, and never more so than right now, dear William:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.
Your mission, ladies, seems now to be to break the law of England as in 1600 and indeed skirt the law of Tennessee as in 2023, and to dress as drag queens trying not to dress as a drag queen and (because drag is perfect imperfection), to not entirely succeed; and then we’ll see what article of what statute you end up “breeching.”
https://time.com/6260421/tennessee-limiting-drag-shows-status-of-anti-drag-bills-u-s/
Read more As You Like It here: https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/playmenu.php?WorkID=asyoulikeit
Nun other than Andres De Blust performing a light-hearted take on a role so ably embraced by Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews, not to mention Gorden Kaye, but not Bruges, occupied France or occupied Salzburg: it’s Andres’s occupation of the Hessenhuis, Antwerp. I don’t know if he gets paid for it. Or whether it’s the audience who get paid. Andres, do note, will do bar mitzvah’s but only as long as there’s no one under 15 present.
The Hessenhuis announces itself as “an embassy of freedom”. So, go! Who knows how long we’ll still have embassies of freedom?