Reviews

The Ireland Martin McDonagh depicts in his two Irish trilogies is not a happy place, especially the town of Leenane in County Galway where The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West are set. Rather than the pretty images tourists see of cottages nestling on the northern edge of Killarney Harbour, the village McDonagh paints is a place of bleakness and dysfunction.

This Scottish trio brings to the Sydney Festival outrageously gay, obscene fantasies of joyous group sex, without ever taking off their clothes. 

They’re aiming for a monster sex pig party in Berlin and their training and backside ambitions are given agile and hilarious description. The action is played at such hysterical speed, volume and endearing Scottish accents, that it’s a thrill just keeping up. A printed glossary of gay slang for the chemicals and sex acts certainly helps.

With just two armchairs and a pot-plant, it starts as a talkshow. A starstruck nerd interviews a self-satisfied writer infamous for his minimal and cliched female characters, the misogynist violence of his stories and his own abusive behaviour backstage. The pursuit of Truth, says our great male artist, is the only contest.

Michael Griffiths creates his own juke box musical by telling us his own gay life story through the songs of the Pet Shop Boys.

As this electronic duo was hitting fame in the late 80s, Griffiths was a lonely, terrified “suburban homo” being bullied at junior school, and then surviving his teens in an average Adelaide suburb called Vale Park.   Now at the piano and on the cusp of 50, he shares this long, rich, sometimes agonising coming out story, backed by just a violin (Julian Ferraretto) and double bass (Dylan Paul).