Review: To Be Straight With You, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Clashing worldviews rarely sit alongside one another in quietly grumbling contrast. Rather, they collide in messy, active and often violent opposition. In To Be Straight With You, contemporary dance-theatre company DV8 turn focus on the deep-set homophobia of strictly religious societies with an equally polemic stance that happens to be more comfortable for its liberal-minded audience. Intolerance, it shouts loudly, is utterly unacceptable. And we, the converted, must nod along unquestioningly.

Using verbatim texts and confessional recordings in conjunction with DV8’s seductive and stylish brand of movement and dance, director Lloyd Newson offers a scattergun argument constructed of individual examples. At times, when the authentic and the artistic sync up, it hits with emotive power, but too often movement and text feel disjointed – like watching a muted television with the radio playing.

With same-sex relationships illegal in eighty-five countries, seven of which employ the death penalty as punishment, DV8 have plenty of evidence at their disposal. However, they fail to shape it into a case or present a sympathetic alternative. Instead we get a stream of solos and duets, victims and perpetrators through which phrases of fire, brimstone and bloody murder recur and recur, clubbing us into flat submission. Moral indignation is the only response available.

However, when the individual segments break free of the diatribe, they become succinct and poignant. The fragile Muslim youth, caught in the blurry bubble of a skipping rope, describes coming out to his family, being cornered in an alley and stabbed by his father. The respectable Indian husband performs a joyous banghra duet with his male lover, also married. Best of all is the seated line-dance – swaying, casual and seemingly harmless – underneath an absurd Christian argument against homosexuality, based on cannibalism and conformity. Gradually, the dance swells in numbers as people subscribe to the logic.

It is no coincidence that these moments are in the hands of Ankhur Bahl and Dan Canham, both of whom are possessed of remarkable fluidity, in storytelling as in dance. Simplicity is the key to the argument and the emotions. Where To Be Straight With You gets carried away with possibilities, particular those of visual projections, it sacrifices impact for technical wizardry. Where the message is left to the words and movements of a talented performer, DV8 create something special and, more importantly, human.

As it is, To Be Straight With You is an important piece of theatre: it needs saying as much as it needs heeding, but it hasn’t the simple vitality to need watching.