Interview: Philip Venables

Malte Jacob in conversation with Philip Venables, composer for The Faggots and their Friends between Revolutions.  

Would you say that The Faggots and Their Friends can be a source of inspiration and of comfort to queer people in a time that is once agian growing more hostile for this community? 

I would like to think that it can be a source of inspiration and comfort. Certainly, we’ve had a whole range of emotional responses from audiences, particularly queer audiences, who have found the work incredibly moving and unusual. I’m sceptical whether this makes any change to the larger world, which seems in such dire straits right now. Art can help us in many ways, and is vitally important, but it’s no substitute for getting out on the streets and protesting.  

Larry Mitchel - the author of the novel that inspired your composition - is considered an icon in the queer community. In the 1970s he founded a small press in New York devoted to gay literature and is in a way a pioneer of gay fiction. Why did you and Ted Huffman (director/ librettist) choose to turn precisely this book into a music theatre production? 

I first encountered the book in 2013 by way of some friends from the Radical Faeries movement, who at that time passed it around as a PDF file since it was out of print. (There is now a fabulous new edition from Nightboat Books which you should buy!). The book blew me away - I absolutely loved the way it speaks about systemic violence and trauma but with such loving resistance, playfulness, and dark humour. I felt seen by the book, and that felt incredibly empowering. I showed it to Ted in 2016, after we had made our first opera together and when we were discussing many new ideas for pieces.  He loved it too and it was something we couldn’t stop talking about. However, for a while we thought it was almost a joke because we didn’t think that anybody would be prepared to produce a show with this title.  It’s a credit to Manchester Festival, the Ruhrtriennale, and all the other great co-producers, who all supported us. 

You said you felt ‘seen’ by this book. Is this in your opinion a universal experience among the queer readers and what made it into a queer cult novel? 

I think so. It’s also the incredible mix of humour and naivety and joy and love. It talks about essentially negative things in the world in very empowering, very positive and playful ways.  It’s very mischievous and cheeky, but with many profound truths in it. 

Would you say that the mixture of genres that this production became - not ‘just’ music theatre or ‘just’ opera - is connected to the idea of being queer? 

For sure there is a lot of overlap. A lot of the time, the distinction doesn’t matter to me when I’m making a piece – but it is important to present it in the right context to audiences. Sometimes we have played it in opera festivals, sometimes in theatre festivals, and each of these have different expectations, which we hope to push against and play with in the form of our piece. We wanted to make something very ambiguous and shape-shifting – one moment it is theatre, with lots of spoken text, another moment we hear operatic voices in baroque songs, other times improvisations or folk-inspired songs or bossa nova or techno or an audience singalong. The piece holds lots of approaches to the voice and theatre. So hopefully it’s sometimes an opera and sometimes not. One of earliest ideas was to use different genres and styles as a metaphor for shifting identities, the idea of ‘playing roles’ and performing – which pervades the queer existence, whether by choice or necessity. There’s a key line in the show: “The faggots and their friends love to perform for each other” – as a way of processing their history, their trauma, their community, and their dreams. So all these different genres in the piece are ways of musically ‘dressing up and performing and telling stories.’  Like different musical costumes for different stories.  

At the Ruhrtriennale, you’re going to perform in the Jahrhunderthalle. How do you think this production will resonate with this, in a way, reclaimed place? 

We haven’t yet played in such an industrial space like the Jahrhunderthalle, so I am very excited. I’m sure there are all sorts of interesting political comparisons that you could draw between the content of the piece and the idea of reclaimed spaces, particularly industrial, capitalist, workers spaces. Aside from that, I’m looking forward to the atmosphere around the Jahrhunderthalle and the festival center and the buzz of the audience and artists all coming together in his kind of hub.

Could you talk a bit about the use of the word ‘faggot’ in the piece and the importance of reclaiming it? 

The presence of this word has thrown up all sorts of discussions throughout our process, from taking a lot of care with our cast to provide safety and support in the rehearsal room, to the more mundane, like how do you post the title of the show on Instagram without it being automatically removed and flagged as abusive. We spent a long time with the whole company talking about what that word meant for everybody in the room and how to handle it carefully and with sensitivity. It means different things to different people, with both associations of violence and empowerment.  In terms of the audience, we wanted to reclaim it in a very positive way and not associate it with violence or negativity, which I think is also what the book does very well. We say the word hundreds of times during the show without any fuss or fanfare, but always in a kind, loving way that is about solidarity. I hope that slowly changes the meaning of the word for the audience, without us having to explain or define it. 

Would you be okay if the outcome of this was that the term ‘faggot’ is used more often again but in this reappropriated, positive sense? 

I just don’t think that there’s a “one size fits all” answer to that question, because I think it will be a long time, generations, maybe centuries for the meaning of such a word to have a universal change. We know that from other potent slur words. We have to be sensitive to the variety of people’s histories and associations to the word.  But for me personally, it has a more positive connotation than negative. However, I am aware it is only so empowering because of its violent past. So, we’ll just have to find the balance. 

You already hinted at the close work with the cast. You collaborated closely with the performers throughout the process. How was that for you and for everybody?  

It was a wonderful way to work – we had several rounds of workshops with the cast before, who we had carefully handpicked, in order to bring together the huge breadth of talents and skills that are in the show.  And then we tried to tailor-make the show for our cast – and I think that comes across clearly when you watch it.  Most of the music was notated in a kind of short score, and then we devised during the rehearsal process who would play, sing or speak each line. It was a combination of a devising process and a learning/staging process. But it’s also the kind of show that keeps evolving, because of the nature of how it works on stage and because of the incredible performers that we have, who are all deeply committed to the show, and to each other. I’ve never worked with a cast that has gelled so well and become like a family.  It’s wonderfully beautiful, and in this show that is about the power of community, it really is life imitating art.