27.02.1997

Benign and magnificent

Helen Ellis reviews Babycakes (directed by Ian Brown)

Much cross casting and interweaving of characters as well as themes brings Armistead Maupin’s dense, intricate and witty novel, which encompasses about 30 characters, including the queen (amongst many), to the stage.

Babycakes the novel, written in 1984, is a narrative on 80s San Francisco. When published, it included the first literary character to die of Aids.

It is always hard to translate the narrative of the novel to the language of the stage. In this production by Clyde Unity Theatre the abrupt subtlety of Maupin’s written word is slow in revealing itself on stage. So much so that through much of the first half of the production you could almost be watching a tragic-farce.

This may have something to do with the total inability to feel any compassion for the main heterosexual couple. Mrs Madrigal, played beautifully by Hope Ross, speaking of Mary Ann Singleton’s “layers of mystery”, can only seem a little implausible.

Essentially of course Maupin writes about the gay community, but the book and this stage production is much mere about sexuality itself. This is heightened by the cross casting as male meets female and swaps places throughout. However, the tender subtlety of this exploration of the blurring of love, friendship and sex only really begins to engage in the second half of the production.

This is not a play about the disappearance of love - there is plenty of love in it. This is its final hope in a world of contingent sex and unfulfilled relationships. The overwhelming metaphor of death, which snatches away love before it is really felt is one of a living death in which contingency too often overwhelms the driving passions of humanity.

The fantastic and benign mystery begins to unravel a godless fate which weighs down upon everything we do. The breaking through of this fate implies the possibility of a happy ending, which here is comically implausible. But so it is intended, as both the magnificent and the mundane are resolved in reverse - the magnificent only appears so, and the mundane is only so because we make it so.

Maupin undoubtedly goes beyond the immediate discourse which still dominates the experience of Aids and sexuality in modem society from a gay perspective Theatre can often produce an explosive commentary on the novel and Clyde Unity Theatre do touch the audience with the central longing in the book. But the exploration of the complexity of our sexual and social experience in the book are only glimpsed at in this production.

Helen Ellis