The Flea

The Flea brings a welcome, madly inventive young director and designer to Sydney’s New Theatre with Patrick Kennedy. 

By British playwright James Fitz, it’s about the very exclusive homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street, London, which in 1889, when stumbled upon by police, threatened to bring down its aristocratic gay clientele, including, as rumoured, the grandson and heir of Queen Victoria, Prince Eddy.

The play is a partly fictionalised crime thriller and moral pantomime about the insurmountable homophobia of the age, just a whisper before Oscar Wilde’s downfall, the vulnerability of all classes of gay men to blackmail, paranoia and exile, and the poverty, hypocrisies and injustice faced by those on the bottom, including of course the rent boys recruited here from London’s Telegraph Office.

On Kennedy’s colourfully adorned, hyper-surreal set of angled walls, ramps, platforms, odd doors and tiny chairs and niches his impressive cast of five leap through multiple roles in an inexplicable number of quick scenes, some even on video.  Happily, the locale of each scene is projected, but the exposition of Fritz’ narrative slips off into tangents and scene changes are overly delayed by musical punctuation.

Most characters are ghoulishly face-painted and vividly costumed by Kennedy in a pageantry of 80’s punk, camp and militaristic excess.  We’re torn between enjoying the burlesque and yet, behind the disguises, we want to know and feel more about these queer lives.

Bringing truth to the buffoonery is Samuel Ireland as the initially innocent, rent boy, Charlie, supporting his widowed mother (Sofie Divall). Both later reappear as, respectively, a viscously merry Bertie, Prince of Wales, scheming slander to save his gay son and Queen Victoria herself, who talks (too long) to God about her own moral choices. 

James Collins is effective as the earnest brothel customer and ultimately exiled Lord Somerset, as is Jack Elliott Mitchell as the camp Lord Euston, whose committed lover also will be forced overseas unless Euston joins the coverup.  The tragic empathy of these later scenes bring depth but again it’s sometimes blown over by funny business.  Mitchell though is nicely droll as the Constable on the hunt with detective Abberline (Mark Salvestro).

There’s much wit and seeds of confronting, thoughtful drama in this entertainment, swirling around in this explosion of competing theatrical styles, and making an important contribution to Sydney’s Mardi Gras Festival.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Chris Lundie