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Company of The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions | Photo: Tristram Kenton

Directed by the composer’s regular collaborator Ted Huffman, Philip Venables’ first opera (2016) – a groundbreaking setting of Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis – won a slew of prizes and put its creator firmly on the map. Its 2019 follow-up Denis & Katya (libretto and again direction by Huffman) concerned the killing by Russian police of a couple of teenagers who had become internet celebrities. 

In a Guardian preview interview, Venables claimed that this latest work – co-commissioned by Manchester International Festival, Aix-en-Provence and Bregenz amongst others, and with Huffman once again responsible for text and direction – is not an opera; maybe music-theatre would be a better designation. 

Its source is a 1977 novel long out of print that has nevertheless won some sort of cult status. American Larry Mitchell wrote it in 1977 in what were quite different times for gay people (or ‘faggots’, as the title prefers), in the US as in many other places. Ned Asta’s original illustrations possess an almost Beardsley-esque charm.  

In this semi-satirical, semi-Utopian, free-wheeling fantasy, the faggots and their friends – who include ‘women who love faggots’ (but presumably – by inference – not women who don’t), are the enemies of the men (read ‘heterosexual men’), who are the source of all the world’s ills, but who will, fortunately, be removed at the coming revolution. 

Meanwhile the faggots (not to forget their friends) dispense kindness and creativity, and constantly make love (not always the word used).  

Necessarily, perhaps, there’s an element of nostalgia – even at times sentimentality – about this remembrance of a lost, pre-Lapsarian time when victimhood inspired the togetherness of the cheerful but determined communal gay struggle. 

In a kind of update section, faggots who have subsequently gone along with the men’s temptations of legality, marriage and other (as some might see them) benefits of being part of society are excoriated for joining the enemy camp – and thereby ceasing to be real faggots at all. Assimilation is clearly a no-no.  

Mariamielle Lamagat, Conor Gricmanis, Deepa Johnny and Kerry Bursey | Photo: Tristram Kenton

The result is a whimsical period piece, celebrating a victimised past from which gay society and indeed US society as a whole has to an appreciable (though certainly not complete) degree moved on – thank god. 

Venables has produced a score varied in style, with references to Elizabethan lute-songs (performed by Kerry Bursey), bossa nova, techno, and the odd moment that might slot into a Disney musical. (‘When the faggots visit the fairies, it is always like entering a wonderful dream.’)  

There’s a good deal of speech, some of it over music. Much of the patchwork score is simple in conception and in part designed for non-professionals to perform; as music director, Yshani Perinpanayagam only needed to intervene occasionally.  

Everyone on stage committed to their material, banner-waving, thin though much of it was. Yandass presented a full-on, angry queer evangelical – an unequivocal rabble-rouser for the cause. More relaxed was Kit Green as a benign emcee, leading the game audience in a communal song whose melody was rather like the Christmas carol ‘The First Nowell’ – though the words, not so much. 

Rosie Elnile supplied the bits-and-pieces set, while the costumes and choreography – both by Theo Clinkard – matched well with the subject and the upfront community representatives on stage.