I first encountered the work of Claudio Macor about twenty years ago when I directed his play VENETIAN HEAT. In this he told a story of gay love and oppression set in the Italian countryside of his grandparents, during the second world war.As you can imagine this is a pretty harrowing evening of theatre although the writer/director tones down the horror a little by lessening the procedure and turning it into two genital injection of monkey hormones.
Macor was inspired by an article in the guardian outlining the few facts history records about this war criminal and demanding an apology from the British government who toyed with the idea of importing the quack and his methods to post war Britain where homosesuals were still persecuted under the law.
He weaves two fictional stories around scenes of Vaernet testing out his theories in Nazi occupied Denmark before being promoted then dropped by the Third Reich and then the Allied foces. He ended up, as many fleeing Nazis did, in Argentina where he lived to an old age.
A little frustratingly scenes exploring Vaernet get the least stage time and mostly comprise of him being irritable with various people although the playwright does invent a back story for him and he irritably relates the suicide of a close friend who drowned himself in a toilet bowl from gay shame. An act requiring considerable contortion and determination.
After the war he meets his match in a British Army Officer who just happens to know about homosexual "treatments" in Britain and who has become very irritable himself after a visit to the concentration camps.
Alongside this we have two other storylines which I must confess were a little rich for my tastes.
A gallery worker with a remarkably modern gay sensibility and attitude to gay identity is caught dallying after dark with a similarly forward thinking American Embassy official who may get a bit of a shock when he returns to 1950's Connecticut hoping to live openly with a boyfriend.
Embassy man is released thanks to diplomatic immunity but gallery man is subjected to two injections in his scrotum. This is deemed to have successfully cured him of homosexuality when he fails to get an erection at the sight of another naked man whilst both are stripped naked in an office, at gun point. This must have been very, very traumatic as five years later when when his lover comes to rescue him he's still a nervous wreck. Extraordinarily Macor has other men reportedly becoming aroused in similar circumstances following their genital injections thereby discrediting Vaernet's theories. Their sex drive must have been extraordinary.
Meanwhile, amidst the intense anti-homosexual paranoia the strutting Nazi officer facilitating the medical procedure turns out to be gay himself and is somehow able to transport and return a former drag star to his apartment, back and forth for five years, like he's a buff library book.
Extraordinary stories then from an extraordinary time but it's all performed with such skill and commitment by an excellent cast led by the always impressive Alexander Huetson and Christopher Hines with Gary Fannin and Bradley Clarkson under Macor's own direction that you're swept along by the momentum of the inconceivable events, which will leave you shaken and stirred!
Transposing the story of King Lear to Australia, Shadow King presents a Lear as the leader of an indigenous community based in the Northern Territory of Australia. Tommy E Lewis’s King Lear is a cheeky child-like, Del Boy figure who chooses to divide his land among his three daughters, with the amount that they are each to receive based upon how well they answer Lear’s question: “How much do you love me?”. Two out of three (Goneril and Regan) give splendidly sycophantic and deceitful answers whilst Cordelia - shocked by her father’s actions - refuses to participate. Subsequently, Lear banishes Cordelia for her lack of love setting in motion a series of events that lead to family feuding, territorial jealousy and we’re off on our tragic way.