The Past is a Wild Party

Qtopia, Sydney’s first queer museum opened recently in the old Darlinghurst police station on Taylor Square.  During the violence of the first Mardi Gas, protesters were thrown here into the police cells, which you can now wander through reading this and other chapters of queer history.  Or hear these stories voiced in a spanking new theatre space where once offenders were unloaded.

The so-called Loading Dock, with seats for 60, is perfect for Qtopia’s current Pride program of solo shows including this new performance essay from the feminist playwright, poet and academic Noëlle Janaczewska.  

The Past is a Wild Party follows an enthused writer sharing their teenage sexual awakening and their quest through historic lesbian literature to discover more about girls having sex with girls. They relishes the veiled hints and swoon described by the late nineteenth century Jewish poet, Amy Levy, giving a travelogue of Levy’s short life in London, thrills to the steamy scenes of women in 1950’s crime novels – written by men, its seems, using female pseudonyms.

Jules Billington is a direct, candid performer, engaging and fully at ease with us and one hour of words.  Moving with fluid physicality through and around a mass of hanging globes, differently illuminated by designer Benjamin Brockman matched to Madeleine Picard’s delicate musical moments.

Director Kate Gaul and Siren Theatre has successfully staged and toured two other solo works by Janaczewska; it shows here in the clarity, ironic wit and emotional truth. elicited here from a text leaping across so many times, historical and personal subjects, and intellectual reflection.

Our performer shares having sex at 18 with a female communist they followed into a Cologne bar, about their own depression, about Sappho, Virginia Woolf of course and Mrs Dalloway, and the shock and censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. 

Janaczewska’s play is nicely propelled by our performer’s earthy quest to discover more “technical” details on having lesbian sex.  They complains that beyond stirrings and heaving breasts there was little written about going deeper below the waist.  Interestingly, they too passes over their own vaginal adventures, but you get the idea.

In this optimistic space of Qtopia, this is a provocative and charming production well worth catching.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Alex Vaughan