Queer Performance and the Drama of Disorientation

Abstract

When Irish theatre and events company THISISPOPBABY took its electro-pop musical Alice in Funderland to the main stage of the Abbey Theatre in 2012, it seemed like Ireland’s vagrant queer performance culture had finally found a home in the national theatre.¹ Since its founding by Jennifer Jennings and Phillip McMahon in Dublin in 2007, the company has gained a reputation for creating diverse projects dedicated to both recuperating and evolving queer performance in Ireland, but always brightening the fringes rather than the main stage of the national theatre. Written by McMahon, with music by Raymond Scannell, and directed by Wayne Jordan, this production was loosely structured around Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). It followed Cork girl Alice’s (Sarah Greene) journey through Dublin’s technicolor underbelly, where she mysteriously finds herself after eating hors d’oeuvres during stressful preparations for her sister’s imminent wedding — an event overshadowed by the recent death of Alice’s own boyfriend. But even though THISISPOPBABY appeared to have found a home for queer performance in the national theatre, here was a musical whose heartbeat pulsed to the pains and pleasures of being lost; of one girl’s search for home, rather than her arrival. Alice’s venture is routed around the reiterated questions: ‘Who am I? Where am I? Which way is home?’ — appeals she connects throughout to feeling ‘very queer indeed’.