Panti Bliss: High Heels in Low Places
Tramway, Glasgow
MARK SMITH
****
YOU can’t help thinking that Panti Bliss has created a new genre. She looks like a traditional drag queen - an ordinary human-being multiplied by six - and she delivers some of the traditional elements of the drag act such as lip-synching to a torch song. But this is much more subtle than it looks - it’s a confession in make-up, it’s a glamorous lecture on the complexity of gay politics, it is vulgarity in the best possible taste.
If you haven’t heard of Panti, then the chances are you weren’t paying attention during the Irish referendum on gay marriage when her alter ego, performer Rory O’Neill, ended up playing a pivotal role in convincing the country to support the measure. Suddenly, in talking about his own experiences of homophobia, Ireland’s most famous drag queen was part provocateur, part national treasure.
O’Neill’s show, which is part of Take Me Somewhere at the Tramway, takes the Irish furore over gay marriage as the starting point, but it quickly ranges into other areas and manages the tricky job of balancing high campery, personal revelation, serious politics and, at some points, even melancholia - for instance, he talks about a young man from his town back in Ireland who committed suicide because he was unable to come to terms with being gay.
However, it is the personal revelations that provide some of the best moments of the show. O’Neill talks about being diagnosed HIV positive, the search for a relationship and the harsh judgments of some people when faced with a drag queen waving her manicured figure at them, and in doing so does something rather remarkable: he piles on the wig, the make-up, the fake breasts and all the other paraphernalia of drag but somehow manages to reveal more than he hides. He is willing to do that thing that makes an audience love a performer: to dig deep.
But - and maybe this is the most important bit - Panti Bliss is funny as well, especially when he does what every audience in a drag show would expect and picks on them for a laugh. He also tackles the politics of the internet, homophobia within the gay community and the random divisions of gender, but he can do what many campaigners are possibly afraid of doing: he can throw in a rude gag, he can be outrageous, he can laugh at a taboo and make us do the same.
Which makes Panti Bliss - even though she looks like your traditional drag queen - different from the others. She is a new, dirty, glamorous genre; she is a performer of great skill whose jokes glitter and cut. She is a new kind of drag queen.
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