The news that David Tennant is to step down soon as Dr Who is certain to fuel the widespread speculation that he might be succeeded by Adrian Lester as the first ever black time-traveller in the long-running television series.

It sounds a very good idea to me, though the subject didn’t come up at all last night at the National Theatre, when I joined Adrian and his delightful actress wife Lolita Chakrabarti for a drink after the premiere of DV8’s To Be Straight With You.

The couple met when both studying at RADA and they now have two young daughters and live in London, despite Adrian’s international film and television commitments. We only had the one drink as they were dashing away to check out yet another possible venue for Adrian’s upcoming fortieth birthday party.

He said one very interesting thing. That when he played Rosalind all those years ago for Cheek by Jowl in New York, people he met around town refused to believe that he wasn’t gay. In other words, an audience assumes you must be gay to play a woman on stage.

Try telling that to Douglas Hodge at the Playhouse tonight, when La Cage aux Folles opens on transfer from the Menier Chocolate Factory. Or to Mark Rylance who was one of the best Olivias ever in Twelfth Night at the Globe.

Of course, the sexuality of an actor might be as confused as it is in anyone else. My plumber friend came round to fix a gas fire the other morning and asked me what I was going to see in the theatre this week.  

I told him: a fashion fusion theatre show at the Brunswick Centre, DV8 in a piece about religious fundamentalism and homosexuality, and La Cage aux Folles. “Blimey, mate,” he said, “you sound as though you’re on the turn. In fact, you could be round the corner and out of sight before you can say Tom Robinson.”

I calmed him down with a nice cup of coffee and an Eccles cake, but you can see the impression people might take by over-identifying a theatregoer with the subject matter of the play he goes to watch, and even more so the actor in the piece itself.

All nonsense, of course. Heterosexual actors have been getting in touch with their feminine sides for decades, and the reverse is true, too; just look at old Ian McKellen butching it up as Coriolanus and King Lear, not to mention Hamlet and Romeo in his younger days.

More seriously, DV8’s show is a timely reminder of the worldwide homophobia still rampant in the hierarchy of the Catholic church, the fundamentalist followers of Islam, the reggae hotspots of Jamaica and the gun and dance-hall culture on our own doorstep.
 
It is a powerful and provocative evening. Everyone in the Lyttelton last night was profoundly moved while also probably wishing that the show itself had a more sustained narrative line and didn’t just work — as it undoubtedly does — as a beautifully staged catalogue of anger, misery and complaint.
   

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.