Grayson Perry - A Show About You
Despite ambitions to be the enfant terrible of British art when he won the Turner Prize in 2003, Grayson Perry is officially a National Treasure. His recent reinvention as an investigative explorer of countercultures and communities, albeit in his civvies, offered a clue as what to expect from his live show. What I didn't expect was for him to break into full throated song.
Theatre Royal
Years ago, I read an interview with the Kings of Leon brothers, where they expressed their bewilderment at the British male's proclivity for dressing up in woman's clothing. Apparently, it's not something you do in the US. It famously ruined Queen’s American career, yet to the typical Brit it's second nature. To paraphrase Graham Chapman, "what man can honestly say that at some time in his life they haven't slipped on fish net stockings? I know I have." I can imagine its why, despite ambitions to be the enfant terrible of British art when he won the Turner Prize in 2003, Grayson Perry now so easily rubs shoulders with the likes of Judi Dench and Alan Bennett as an official National Treasure.
It should come as no surprise, then, that for his solo show he was a ship in full sail, his only concern being that he might inadvertently scare off those suffering from Coulrophobia. Despite his obvious and genuine talent as a potter - or ceramicist as we were told we should say - there can't have been many at the Theatre Royal expecting a lecture on clay. His recent reinvention as an investigative explorer of countercultures and communities, albeit in his civvies, may have offered a more likely clue. What I didn't expect was for him to break into full throated song. In what proved to be the first of mercifully infrequent occasions, Grayson bellowed out a comedy song with the unselfconscious enthusiasm of an X factor contestant destined to go no further. He's a self-aware man, so he must know he can't sing - at least I hope he knows - so best to put this down to post modernism, and to be fair there were some good jokes lurking in the undergrowth.
For the most part, thankfully, the show settled down to an exposition of Perry's take on identity. In short, in his view it doesn't exist. To be more specific, it’s not something you have, or can claim for yourself. Rather, it is as a consequence of shared agreement between you and those around you. At times, this teetered dangerously close to the minefield of identity politics, before skipping merrily away onto safer ground, and I thought that a pity. For a man that prides himself on being open and honest, he nevertheless has a twitching antenna for what's best left unsaid. Tellingly, the most effective part of the show was his own case study, where he took us through, with the help of some rather lovely and touching photos, his journey through cross dressing and onward to the exaggerated persona of Claire, the version of femininity he prefers to "proper" transvestism, which, he confessed, he finds rather boring. Boring it may be, but it's also more closely associated with the hurt and prejudice that he deftly side steps by so often being a safe cartoon rather than something, or more exactly, someone, more challenging. Perry is an intelligent, empathic man, whose talent for embracing different viewpoints is incontestable, so such thoughts must surely run around his head, yet we heard little that hinted at such complexity of thought.
Instead, he invited his audience to answer broad, largely anodyne, questions about gender, politics, sex and artificial grass. We did so via a fun app previously downloaded, with great significance placed on how similarly audiences around the country answered. The thesis it supported was that society thinks much the same about most things, and where it disagrees, it is to the same extent. I'm not sure it's a conclusion that can be safely drawn from a straw poll taken from a group of people happy to pay good money to watch a transvestite potter natter for a couple of hours, but then Grayson could always fall back on the argument that this was, after all, a comedy show.
Perry is an affable fellow that is very good company, but if I have a misgiving it's on this point. He's a witty man, but this was a show that raised more chuckles than belly laughs. And neither was it hugely insightful. Good points were made, but few that did more than bounce around the echo chamber of a compliant audience. Add the fair to middling jokes to the wry observations and you can arrive at aggregate score which equates to an entertaining evening. Yet despite the grandstanding finish, the nagging doubt remained upon departing that I'd seen a show that wasn’t one thing or another, and I left feeling vaguely undernourished as a result.
