Our Blood Runs In The Street

Our Blood Runs In The Street
Chopt Logic / Red Line Productions. Old Fitz Theatre, Woolloomooloo. Feb 19 – Mar 21, 2020

With The Campaign running at the Seymour Centre about the activists who drove Tasmanian gay law reform, and now this show about five decades of gay violence in NSW, Mardi Gras shows itself as more than just sex, glitter and show tunes.

Both plays are impressively researched verbatim documentaries drawing on interviews and records and both are told with empathy and imagination.

Our Blood Runs in the Street is a tribute to the 89 mostly gay men murdered – each named - most at the height of AIDS anxiety between 1988 and 1995.  It’s also an exposure of the tolerated violence and homophobia, especially from teenage males, and the inexplicable failure of the police to investigate these murders.

A current NSW Parliamentary Enquiry into Gay and Transgender Hate Crimes may – finally – produce some answers. 

Meanwhile, seven young actors slickly play various victims, their grieving family members, journalists, police officers and researchers as well as the gangs of teenager murderers.   They’re backed by long low notes of music from Nate Edmondson and composer Damien Lane and Richard Whitehouse’s spotlighting through the dark on Veronique Benett’s effective open set. 

Director Shane Anthony has tailored the text just as well as he’s choreographed the intense physicality of his actors, into surges of violence or male group solidarity or gay strutting and courtship. 

At best (ignoring the odd lecturing to the audience), it borders on the fabulous male focused dance theatre of Lloyd Newson’s DV8.   The actors are Andrew Fraser, Cassie Hamilton, David Helman, Eddie Orton, Sam Plummer, Ross Walker and Tim Walker.

Martin Portus

Photographer:Jasmin Simmons

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