Meet Johnny, 18 and in his final year of boarding school. He ambles through daily life, Britney in his ears, failing to fit into the school’s (rather rigid) mould. Enter Harry, the rugby golden boy. To save time, Johnny and Harry shag. Constantly. This isn’t a coming out story or a gay tragedy and it is definitely not porn. It is life through the lens of a young queer man, navigating Grindr, hyper-masculinity and an institution rife with shame. We sat down with the team from An Adequate Abridgement of Boarding School Life as a Homo to discuss the production.
After last year’s Bobby Award-winning Fringe run, how did returning to the show for this tour shift your perspective on the story you’re telling?
I don’t think our mindset shifted too much to be honest, we don’t tend to overthink things and we’re quite a go with the flow team. We had so much fun at the fringe, but it just went so quickly and so we were all pretty dead set on bringing the show back, we felt it had more to give and wanted to get in front of more audiences. That being said it has been so much fun bringing in Harvey Weed to play the role of Harry & Others and quite organically, the show has developed around his style of comedy and take on the character. Meg, one of our directors and the team building our set have also been getting very creative with new design ideas for the show and we’ve got Kitty our choreographer coming back in to teach us some new dance moves, I’m hoping this time I can get all the steps right! So it will definitely be a new version of the show, but with all the original themes and overall sentiment.
If you could add one more iconic pop star to guide Johnny through boarding school life alongside Britney, who would it be and why?
Ooooo big question – early Madonna! Songs like ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Like a Prayer’ definitely have a big overlap with the show’s themes of religion and queer rebellion, would have really loved to lean into some good old Catholic suppression. It was a close call between Britney and Madonna, we just didn’t have the budget for an authentic cone bra and Britney had a bit more scope for choreographed teenage intimacy that didn’t involve too much graphic detail. You could also make a good case for JoJo Siwa for very similar reasons to the above.
How do you balance the raw vulnerability of queer shame with the show’s irreverent humour without diluting either element?
I think by trying to really stay true to both, the comedy and the more vulnerable bits. It was definitely nice to have a bit of reassurance that audiences agreed with what our team thought was funny, a lot of it is situational comedy, lots of it is great multi-rolling and comedic timing by Will (our previous Harry & Others) and Harvey (our current), and some of it is expert choreo to a Britney soundtrack. But the comedy in the play is more often than not a bit of a defensive mechanism and Johnny’s way of coping through school, and I think that’s the experience of a lot of queer people at school. For me I turned to female comedians like Miranda and used that kind of camp silly humour to try and show that I didn’t take myself too seriously. We don’t try and expose humour as a shallow way of dealing with insecurity nor do we try and trap audiences into an hour of gay tragedy with a few “that’s gay” jokes. We try and play true to the joy of someone who finds their way through growing up through humour but also exploring that it can be quite painful to be laughed at, especially at school and especially when you’re queer.
In what ways did the boarding school setting help you amplify the tension between conformity and identity, especially for a queer protagonist?
Boarding School is just quite a blatant symbol of repression in this country, it’s quite low-hanging fruit really. There have been so many portrayals of boarding school in the media, and our take was building the setting around the queer character, it’s his world and he dictates to the audience how he sees it. The tension comes from when the school starts fighting back against Johnny and the narrative gets taken out of his hands. Most of the multi-rolling characters that Harvey does are various representations of the school, lots of them are comedic and some of them are that bit more oppressive, and so the things outside of Johnny’s control like those other characters are what creates the internal conflict for Johnny by the end of the play.
How do you hope audiences with no experience of queer identity—or boarding school—connect with Johnny’s journey?
I hope people trust the journey a little bit. We’re quite obvert with the set up and the context of where the story takes place (it’s mostly all in the name of the show), but in doing that it allows us to really focus in on a queer narrative, one that avoids queer baiting tropes and is mostly grounded in coming to terms with identity at an early age, that’s what we’re interested in exploring and what we hope audiences can relate to.
With a new audience in London and an upcoming return to the Fringe, have you adapted the show in response to different cultural or generational reactions?
The script is often subject to a bit of change. There is one part of the script (no spoilers) that is a lot about shame, and we just keep changing it and redrafting it because so many of the chats we’ve had with audiences, or messages we’ve got, even a letter that someone sent to us after fringe, were about the character’s experience of shame. This part of the script is new and I think the reason we keep redrafting it is because we don’t want to it to be too poetic or self-reflective, but instead show the same to be truthful and appear in real time, we want it to hit home for audiences because it’s a cross generational feeling. We’re nearly there with it and I think it will be a worthwhile adaptation.
Tickets are available here for London 21st – 25th May and here for Manchester 30th and 31st May.