Diary of a Dublin Drag Diva
Bewley’s Cafe Theatre
★★★☆☆
“I’m very private, but over the years I’ve created a monster,” Davina Devine says, with nervous laughter, in her solo show. After two decades the drag queen has reason to have her guard up: when we see her begin to type her name into a search bar, the top autofilled query is “Who is Davina Devine without make-up?”.
Unlike her peers, Davina has revealed little about who she is out of drag. That remains her business. What has changed is her desire to put a narrative on her own story.
This charming show is indebted less to the pristine monologues of Panti Bliss than to the show-and-tell of Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally’s My Therapist Ghosted Me (a show Davina toured with as opening act), deploying a slide show that depicts her childhood as an “accidental performer” in 1990s Ringsend.
Along the way there are excellent line-deliveries unafraid of awkward truths, including an impersonation of an enthusiastic music-industry representative visiting her school: “Michael Jackson is coming to town … and he wants children!” (Davina sang in a children’s choir as part of Jackson’s performance at Lansdowne Road in Dublin in 1992.)
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More often there is a tendency to fluff punchlines and transitions, like a nightclub MC caught uneasily in a space where they’re expected to monologue. (See the accidental bathos of one build-up when she waits for her grandfather to come across a photo of her drag persona in a newspaper.)
There are still treasures. Rare photos of her in “baby drag” – which is to say without spray tan – will be catnip to queer scenesters. Frequenters of Dublin’s drag scene know Davina’s transformation from gladiatorial dancer to physical comedian. A superb re-creation of an old, haphazard lip-sync to Britney Spears’s Slave 4 U, performed with real python, is her at the height of her storytelling powers.
Runs at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Sunday, September 14th; then at Smock Alley Theatre on Friday, September 19th
