This is an extraordinary piece of theatre.
Written by Noëlle Janaczewska and directed by Kate Gaul, it has performer Jules Billington present a persona who shares the story of “re-queering” herself.
The Covid years give the persona both the impetus and the time to re-investigate lesbian voices in fiction, and she juxtaposes her discoveries with her own romantic and sexual history.
The work is remarkable on many levels.
Firstly, it’s a delight to see on stage a persona with an intellectual life. (It’s standard for Australian playwrights to create characters less intelligent than themselves. Why?) The persona discusses the joy she’s found in lesbian writers like Sappho, Amy Levy, Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf. (Though not specifically mentioned in this production, Clarissa Dalloway’s ecstatic response to Sally Seton – “She is beneath this roof….she is beneath this roof!” – is surely one of the most thrilling lines in 20th century fiction.) And the persona, excited by literature, is naturally also excited by language. She kissed her she quotes from a novel, and then savours that In most sentences it’s the verbs that do the heavy lifting; here, it’s the pronouns. She muses mischievously on the changing meaning and connotations of the word queer, and plays punning linguistic games with its spelling. Janaczewska gives this persona language that’s playful, precise and poetic.
Secondly, the work is magnificently transgressive in its form. Annoyingly, no doubt, I keep referring to the persona, rather than the character. I’ve done this because we’re not being offered the regulation artistic facsimile of a person, a created character that we’re invited to comprehend in terms of motivation and to judge in terms of competency of execution. There’s not the slightest whiff of dramatic irony; we know nothing more than the speaker herself. The literary antecedents of this type of thing are the great humanist essays of the likes of Montaigne, but when I say essay, I don’t mean the dull academic sort. The humanist essay has always gloried in sharing the personal in order to facilitate a discussion of the universal, but it also reminds us that, regardless of which grand narrative we choose to lose ourselves in, Life is always lived from the inside, in the particular place and time you find yourself. The magic of Janaczewska’s approach is that she takes this very literary tradition and gives it theatrical form, and so further highlights the individual – the wonder of human Life as it is actually lived. The concrete, the particular, the specific, suggested in the written essay form by only language, is beautifully enhanced here by the performer’s voice and movement. There’s no sloppy abstraction, only marvellous multifaceted reality.
Which leads me to my third point – Jules Billington’s splendid performance. Guided by Gaul, they give a performance that is (to the very syllable, the very glance) exact, crisp and yet still utterly natural. It’s a joy to witness an actor use all the tools in the box with such consummate skill.
With the aid of lighting designer Benjamin Brockman’s hanging globes, Gaul gives Billington a space that evokes the inner world, the liminal, the perpetual becoming, rather than being, which is the hallmark of the life of the intellect.
And, finally, let me consider the work thematically. On the simplest level, it’s about the silencing of lesbian voices.
An analogy (not Janaczewska’s): What we can say is analogous to What we can see. The electromagnetic spectrum consists of a middle ground – all the light we can see – which is bordered on either side by wave lengths beyond human perception. What we can say inhabits a similar spectrum. The middle consists of what can be easily shared and discussed, but this common ground is bookended by two great silences.
On one side is all the things we’re not permitted to talk about. One of these was, and is, the queer sexual experience. We live in a censorious age. Book bannings are increasing. And, with the fear of being cancelled, comes the even more insidious censorship of self.
The past is a wild party because, if you explore literary history, it becomes apparent there’ve been times queer sexuality has been celebrated. Perhaps we’re experiencing a blip, an aberration that was most pronounced with Victorian prudery but still cankers in contemporary conservatism. But there’s hope in looking both into the past and into the future.
But what about the other end of my imagined spectrum of speech? If one border designates the limit of what it is permitted, what does the other border designate? What it is possible. There’ll always be the ineffable, those human experiences which seem beyond artistic representation, where silence reigns supreme.
But, with its gloriously innovative form, The Past is a Wild Party pushes back that boundary as well.
Paul Gilchrist
The Past is a Wild Party by Noëlle Janaczewska
At Loading Dock Theatre until 27 July
Image by Alex Vaughan
Theatre Red 
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