Theatre about performance

A drag act is a piece of theatre about performance – the performance of gender, of course, and, in the best acts, the performance of identity and what that tells us about society. A Life in Three Acts, running at the Soho Theatre, is a performance of a conversation: drag legend Bette Bourne talking to the playwright Mark Ravenhill about Bourne's truly remarkable life. The text, of which they hold copies as they talk, is Ravenhill's version of numerous recorded conversations between the two, tightened, revised and reshaped into a linear narrative of the life (not a million miles from the approach taken by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich for the interview book This Is Orson Welles).

Bourne's story speaks of extraordinary talent, extraordinary political engagement, extraordinary experience of society, extraordinary self-fashioning. The conversation about it, by nature of the show's peculiar form, at first seems stilted, at one remove from itself; how can we buy their 'surprise' when a given figure appears in one of the photographs projected behind them? The awkwardness wears off but the self-consciousness remains, rhyming beautifully with the matter of Bourne's life by foregrounding of the performative nature of conversation, with all its rehearsals and strategies. It's another path to the kernel of drag, which is to say, as apparently the mother of one of Bourne's fellow squatters did while taking tea at their Notting Hill drag-queen commune, "Well, it's all theatre, isn't it?"

Photo © Soho Theatre