Written by Alison Skillbeck
Review by Moyra Jones
The lace curtain is drawn across the stage. As the audience drifts in, we find ourselves in suburbia – morning or perhaps edging into afternoon. When the lights go down and Jonny Woo awakes, it’s with a bang, launching straight into an electric lip-sync of Some People from Gypsy.
The show is autobiographical, beginning in the sleepy Medway Towns where Woo grew up before moving through London and New York in the 1990s. Threaded throughout is the ghostly figure of a mysterious suburban crossdresser. Woo wears their gowns from start to finish – a shimmering emblem of queerness once hidden behind closed doors, now defiantly revealed.
It has the spirit of My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?), but with a darker, more dangerous edge of camp. Woo came of age in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis – a shadow cast over his first sexual experience and many that followed. He recalls his youth in the Bricklayer Arms in Shoreditch, memories soaked in drunken exhilaration but edged with risk.
The production has moments of striking theatricality; a particularly powerful image is Woo in a bath, lit by a single pool of light, half-concealed by the net curtain, recounting the events of the night before. This is a show into which Woo pours his heart, soul, and everything else. It ends with a raw, gut-punching rendition of Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn – a closing as vulnerable as it is fierce.
Striking Theatricality
Jonny Woo: Suburbia runs at Summerhall – Main Hall
Running time: Sixty minutes without interval
Review by Moyra Jones (contact@corrblimey.uk)
Edinburgh University graduate and theatre practitioner. Moyra is particularly excited by interdisciplinary approaches to theatre and how the medium speaks to our contemporary world. With broad interests, she is especially excited about comedy dramas, cabaret, and clowning at this year’s Fringe.
