Part rock opera, part cabaret, Hedwig and the Angry Inch used to be a very New York play, until it came to Dublin, writes Peter Crawley
In the tiny Focus Theatre, currently closed for refurbishments but today in use as a rehearsal space, something is horribly apparent: Barbra Streisand has become a problem. Until now the director and the cast of Hedwig and the Angry Inch had relied upon the star of Yentl to provide them with the punchline to a throwaway gag, but the pantheon of camp culture has moved on.
"It's such a cop-out," director Erin Murray now decides, and everyone agrees. As the young theatre company ready Hedwig - the catch-fire success that began life here in the Focus a year ago, became a glittering highlight of last year's Dublin Fringe Festival and has now been invited to Project Arts Centre - nothing is safe. So, through no real fault of her own, Babs has been made redundant.
"We need something that is super-now gay," insists Murray. On stage, in a denim dress trimmed with pink lace and offset with sturdy black boots, Joe Roch (who plays the East-German transsexual Hedwig) attempts to update the gag.
The Pussycat Dolls? His suggestion is shot down by Megan O'Riordan, breaking character from the usually silent Croatian roadie, Yitzhak. "You're wearing a Belle and Sebastian T-shirt," she retorts. "I don't want to hear it." These are strong words coming from somebody in a Boyzone sweatshirt, but such arguments are the substance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a wild show somewhere between a rock opera, a cabaret, a stand-up gig and a theatre play, soaked through with references to classical and popular culture.
The play, written by John Cameron Mitchell with a score by Stephen Trask, is thankfully wide open to such revisions. "It does say in the script that it's meant to be adapted to the venue," says O'Riordan during a break between run-throughs. "It's also meant to be adapted to current events."
"It would be a disservice to the audience not to make it relevant to Dublin," adds Roch. "I fell in love with it in New York, and it was such a New York show. It took a few rehearsals to figure out how it fits into Dublin." This is a small irony, not lost on Roch and O'Riordan, who founded Making Strange Theatre Company precisely because they didn't fit into Dublin.
Both had been students at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York University (although unknown to each other) who met while studying in Trinity College. They fell in love with the Irish theatre scene, but felt slightly alienated by the productions staged at the Abbey and the Gate (hence the name of their company). As Roch once put it, "Nobody's ever going to cast me in Playboy of the Western World."
In the year since Hedwig first opened, though, they have discovered a like-minded haven of young artists. "This is a really interesting time for Irish culture and Irish theatre-making," says O'Riordan. "The people who are picking up the gauntlet are the people our age, who are doing it by any means necessary and who are given the chances to do so." Making Strange's next production, an original piece devised with a company of young actors, will be staged during this year's Dublin Fringe Festival. "It's a new work about contemporary Dublin," O'Riordan says, "and how the stories people are telling themselves are changing." In fact Hedwig, a word-of-mouth success in the city, might be a good example.
First performed in New York in 1997, John Cameron Mitchell's play tells the tale of Hansel, a youth who undergoes a sex-change operation to marry an American soldier (the operation is botched, resulting in the "angry inch" of the title). Subsequently abandoned in Kansas by the soldier, the renamed Hedwig is left stranded between cultures, countries and genders, turning to part-time prostitution and baby-sitting. When she falls in love with an army brat, who she transforms into a rock star, his career goes global while she ends up an acidulous but compelling "internationally ignored song stylist", her trashy tales of love and loss set to the music of a disinterested band, The Angry Inch.
"That's the dreaded question," winces O'Riordan. "What's it about? People get this alarmed, nervous expression when I tell them. Then I'd say, 'But it's really about love.' " Infused with the rational philosophies of Plato's Symposium, a debate about love, Hedwig is at once magnificently cerebral and delightfully kitsch.
ITS SCORE, A shameless confection of glam-rock and punk outbursts, essentially serves as a Cliffs Notes companion to the Symposium. One song even offers a faithful synopsis of Aristophanes' speech on the origin of love.
In Plato's Symposium the Greek playwright suggested that there were originally three sexes and the human form consisted of four arms, four legs and two faces. Threatened by the power of such creatures, the gods split them in two, and humans of every sexual orientation have been seeking their other half ever since. "Human nature was originally one, and we were a whole," concluded Aristophanes, "and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love." Or, as Hedwig sings, "We called it love. So we wrapped our arms around each other, trying to shove ourselves back together."
Even the wounded city of Berlin, its two halves suddenly and uneasily reconciled, becomes a character in Hedwig's story. And the brilliantly poor-taste humour of Cameron Mitchell's script uses the balm of camp to trace the scars of history. O'Riordan's Yitzhak, for instance, is revealed to have once been a Jewish drag queen called Crystal Nacht, while at one point Hedwig receives a phone call telling her that she is the new face of the Serbian tourist board. "Come back to greater Serbia/ Come Christian, come Jew," she trills. "We hope you can join us/ We've cleansed it for you."
BACK IN THE Focus, Murray asks Roch to uses a particular gesture to accompany this singsong reference to ethnic cleansing. "My Jessica Simpson move," nods Roch. "I think it's more Kylie," Murray responds. At the moment, however, neither Simpson nor Minogue are a source of worry - the sound of Hedwig's ringing phone is. In previous productions, when her phone was due to ring, a crew member simply called an onstage mobile phone.
But since graduating from the 63-seat Focus to the 250-seat Project, such rough and ready problem solving has proved contentious.
"I guess it's hard for a young director, shedding student drama," says Murray. A recent graduate from Trinity College, originally from Seattle, Murray brims with ideas and enthusiastic suggestions, but is quickly discovering the culture shock of large spaces and large organisations - at the Project, the real ringing phone will be replace by a sound effect. "In production meetings people were like, 'Well, what happens if you're running low on credit? What happens if the battery dies?' I was like, 'Wow. Well that never really happened us.' " They recall that Hedwig's phone did once act up at the Focus, but Roch improvised his way around it. It's par for the course; the part of Hedwig and the genre-defying nature of the show demand that Roch has the tart tongue of a drag-act, the confidence of a rock-star and the quick-wit of a stand-up. "Hedwig's a show where you have to think on your feet," he shrugs.
And yet Hedwig is also a role that tends to efface its performer. Once you peel back the layers of make-up, the stick-on eyelashes and - at the risk of employing a reference that is not super-now gay - the Farrah Fawcett wig, Roch is pretty much unrecognisable. (How many of Project's patrons would notice him in his "money job", working behind the bar of the Project?).
At last year's Fringe Festival Awards, they recall, O'Riordan accepted Hedwig's award for Best Spiegeltent Show. An actress approached her with fervent congratulations before asking where she could find Hedwig. Roch was standing in front of her. "Oh really!" the actress gasped. "But you're so short!" Roch sighs at the memory, but he shouldn't feel upstaged. As anyone who has seen the show will tell you, Hedwig is bigger than us all.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch opens at the Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin, on Wednesday and runs until Jul 15. Previews on Tuesday. Tel: 01-8819613/14. www.project.ie