Gay performance artist David Hoyle dropped his nom de stage years ago, but it's taken that long to exorcise his demons. As he prepares for an appearance in Dublin, the man formerly known as The Divine David tells Peter Crawleyabout the benefits of shock theatre and therapy - and why it's hard to totally abandon the old persona

SIX years ago, David Hoyle decided he had had enough. After a decade spent as the leading iconoclast of the gay performance underground, disseminating outrageous opinions during hilarious, if sometimes rather terrifying, shows, he decided to put his acidulous alter ego, The Divine David, on ice. Literally. Performing his swansong in London's Streatham Ice Rink, the character described for convenience sake as a "punk-gay-cabaret-terrorist" ended his stage and television career before an audience of one thousand mourners.

At the time, Hoyle etched his own epitaph with typically acerbic wit: "The world needs another gurning celebrity like it needs a hole in the head."

The truth, however, was much darker. Years of hedonistic living in London had begun to loosen his sense of identity. It became difficult to distinguish where David Hoyle, the cabaret performer from Blackpool, ended and where the frighteningly unpredictable Divine David began.

"Performance had been the most important component of my life," Hoyle says today. "I basically just lived for the shows and lived a sort of a non-life in between."

Now, after six years in the wilderness, as he puts it, Hoyle is finally performing again under his own name. But while he will allude to his breakdown on stage in some detail - "I'm quite happy to share it with the group" - Hoyle is more cautious in interview.

In a recent, jam-packed residency at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the venue where he saw Lily Savage launch her career in the '80s, Hoyle performed a weekly variety show called Magazine, devoting one of seven "issues" to the theme of mental health. Here, in an improvised sketch between himself and a therapist, he traced the depths of his post-Divine David depression with lip-wobbling, weepy, comic exaggeration.

"I felt as low as a beach shit house on a bank holiday," he blubbed, borrowing a phrase from Dame Edna Everage to properly evoke his nadir. As the sketch continued, and a stagehand poured yet more wine into his teacup, Hoyle shed the tremble from his voice, becoming more certain, even aggressive.

"Did you have a handle on this persona, The Divine David?" the therapist asked. "I had four-hour conversations with demonic priests every night when I killed him off," replied Hoyle.

This, it transpires, was no joke. "I had massive conversations that would go on forever," he tells me the following afternoon. "It was exhausting. They never ended. It was a very frightening place to be."

Although Hoyle seemed to grow impatient with the theme as the night went on, lambasting therapists, the media, the government and even the concept of sanity itself, in reality he's a proponent of therapy.

"It teaches you how to discipline your mind," he tells me. "And to perhaps have more control, so that you're in charge, not any voices that are coming in. You learn to ignore them."

Even with The Divine David firmly behind him, the difference between Hoyle's onstage character and the calm figure sipping orange juice in this south London cafe couldn't be more pronounced. Only a discreet crust of turquoise nail varnish clings to his fingers as a reminder of the chaotic spirit from the night before: the wayward sprite who had asked audience members to spit into cups of poster paint before hurling the concoction at a paper backdrop to make an abstract painting; the free-associating figure who could finish a splenetic tirade against government health policy with the words "and now for a contemporary dance".

Though Hoyle no longer considers himself "as tormented a person" as the man behind The Divine David, on stage he retains much of his previous image: a spunky, elfin wig and carelessly applied make-up which can make his eye sockets seem cadaverously hollow - a look somewhere between horror and camp, once described perfectly as "a decomposing Liza Minnelli".

"I'd like to think that any barrier I've had has been broken down now," Hoyle says, "and that I'm as open as I can be as a human being. But I am aware that I do have a stage persona and that sort of takes over the minute I get onstage. It's just like being possessed."

Perhaps that's why his performances often leave Hoyle with a lot of explaining to do. An often-repeated remark of his, in which he described the mainstream gay scene as "the biggest suicide cult in history", has apparently been taken out of context.

"People have seized on that as a quote," he sighs. "I was actually talking about safer sex practices and that sort of thing, and how self-esteem is very important and without self-esteem people are unlikely to adopt safer sex practices. I actually think the way the gay community has dealt with HIV and AIDS is very mature and commendable, so I'm not always critical. There are aspects of gay life and the gay scene that I think are laudable."

To many, this may sound like back-pedalling. Hoyle has never exactly been a paragon of social responsibility, and his popularity was built on outrageous polemics, performative shock tactics and systematic assaults on sacred cows. (Legend has it that among less sympathetic audiences he was sometimes asked to cut his act short for fear of violent eruptions.) Hoyle's agenda, however, was always intended to be more constructive, motivated by a fervent - if naive - desire to actually change the world. He insists that he never set out to court outrage.

"No." he says emphatically. "Not consciously. I might be wrong, but I can't say that I sit down and say 'Ooh, I want to be outrageous'. It's just normal behaviour for me. I've no awareness of it. I'm either stupid or naive, I don't know."

Hoyle presents his defence so reasonably, so gently, that it's easy to forget for a minute that this man presided over a recent show in which a three-foot bicycle chain was retrieved from a male escort in a procedure usually best left to the most diligent of customs officers.

"It was impressive," coos Hoyle. "You wonder how he gets it in there. It was a very sensitive display and an interesting insight into his world."

Uh-huh. I think back to the previous night's sketch when Hoyle briefly broke character to announce: "I was taking the piss back then . . . and to a certain extent I still am." Indeed, the reason for our meeting is Hoyle's impending visit to the Abbey Theatre, where he will deliver a talk-cum-performance entitled Homage to Outrage.

"I think it's a quite interesting subject matter really," he says, as though it were some misty abstraction. "What's outrageous to one person might not necessarily be outrageous to somebody else. Truth itself can be outrageous because some things we're not meant to address. To question things can be outrageous. To have an opinion is outrageous."

He will admit there have been times - long since passed and which he does not care to specify - when he has gone too far in a performance. "I've felt, in the past, a great sense of shame," he reflects quietly. "I did go into realms that were a bit beyond dark, beyond bleak. And I don't want to go there again. Some of what I did in the past, I'm glad it's in the past. That's where it belongs." Yet he will not dwell on it.

Now 44, Hoyle has exorcised most of his demons. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm as healed as I'm likely to be," he says. "Although I'd hate to be so sorted that you become an antiseptic blob of humanity." And if he has little time for shock tactics, he has still less for regret. "I think that guilt is as corrosive and as serious as any form of cancer."

"Besides," he adds brightly, "guilt's very aging and can result in furrowed brows. I'm at an age where you've got to be aware of that. There's no way I want to be walking around with a face like a walnut."

David Hoyle presents his Homage to Outragein the Abbey Theatre on Tuesday, January 9th at 6.30pm as part of the Abbey Talks programme, In Praise of Outrage