Unlady? Like!: Women On Stage At Brisbane Festival

When the Fest rolls into town, it's a chance to experience something a little bit different. And this year, it's a space for underrepresented voices — those of feminist and queer Australians — to be proudly championed.

Amongst these stories, there's Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit, a lesbian musical (with only one white character) by Jean Tong; Mother's Ruin; a feminist revisionist history of gin in cabaret form; "sex clown" Betty Grumble's SCUM Manifesto inspired Love And Anger performance art; and YUMMY, a drag cabaret revue that fucks with gender altogether.

These are shows filled with wit and joy and whimsy, but they also represent a moment of significance. 2018 is a strange time of political discord and social disconnect, but for these artists, there's hope to be found within the mess — and a turning of the tides: long denied voices are finally being heard.

For Tong, whose show is a "big gay party" that leans on and subverts queer narrative stereotypes, now is the only time her musical could have ever experienced this success. In Melbourne, where she is based, "the conversations [about racial disparity onstage] had already been had and the way had already been paved by everyone who's been working for decades before me. I didn't have to fight as hard compared to people who are much older than me, and I feel really lucky. Part of what made their lives so hard is part of what makes my message and my content a lot more palatable, and there's an audience that has been taught, and guided, and now they're ready for it."

Maeve Marsden, performer and co-creator of Mother's Ruin — who, during the marriage equality postal survey, wrote a coming out moment into the show to turn her implicitly queer presence onstage into an explicit one, agrees. "As I push more into art festivals and theatre spaces, it feels much more comfortable to me than the comedy spaces I was in for the first few years of my career [with feminist musical comedy act Lady Sings it Better]." For her, it has been a relief to now participate in theatre and cabaret festivals, where creators and audiences are a little bit weirder and warmer. "It feels, as a queer woman, more like coming home."

But not everything is quite as equitable as it could — or should — be. Emma Maye Gibson, aka self-proclaimed "sex clown" Betty Grumble, points out that "2018 is still thick with fuckery. We need total animal, human, all being liberation. Can it ever be?

In Love And Anger, which she calls a "flesh riot," Gibson revisits Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, a radical feminist text that has been both exalted, and derided, for its anger at the injustice of life within a patriarchal society. But its anger is the key, even now, for Gibson.

"We should end the tyranny of 'maleness', the bullshit reign of corporate control and the jealousy of a sex run by control freaks. Valerie wanted to release us all from the 'ungrooviness' by destroying the paranoid paradigm. It's poetry." 

And then there's YUMMY, which wears the past on its sleeve and the future in its choices. Beginning its life as an underground drag cabaret, it takes its name from the 1994 event The Tasty Raid. Some, Director of YUMMY Productions James Welsby explains, consider that event to be "Australia's Stonewall Riot" because of its parallels with police brutality, and the assertion of queer identity in retaliation." YUMMY is "a positive riff on that, [bringing] the healthy, creative, and safe world I dreamed of to life on stage.

"After having such a divisive and emotional national poll last year on marriage equality, I think we [the queer community] occupy an interesting space in society — we're more accepted than ever, but still deal with the backlash, violence, and prejudice. I think it makes our skin thick, and we're pretty fearless when it comes to the decisions we make."

Half of the drag-clad cast of YUMMY are women — known within the drag scene as 'bio queens' — backing up the group's belief that gender and gender performance in drag are both expressions of truth. "We visualise our complex genders through our costuming and physicalise it through our choreography," Welsby says, as they aim for a more inclusive form of drag, where cross-dressing isn't the joke, but rather the medium for the joke. This helps cut down on audience alienation.

Mother's Ruin, which is deeply feminist, also reaches out to a wider audience. "You could turn up not knowing [about the show's feminist slant from its marketing]," Marsden says. "And that was both by design and incidental. We don't shy away from talking about the feminist themes in the show, we're not trying to trick people, but we also wanted to show that you can do a feminist reading of anything and make it engaging and thoughtful and entertaining." 

And while Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit contains plenty of inner-circle references and jokes for queer audience members, it too is a work for everyone to process this new, post-Yes world together. "Our opening night [at Poppyseed Theatre Festival] was the day that the Yes vote was announced.

"It's not very often that theatre is happening in the moment because it often takes so long to make. It was pretty amazing to touch that historical moment as it was happening; it was a moment for all of us to hang onto, and not feel like we were going to be attacked again."