Naked Homo Live! is set in a members’ only gay club, with an intimate audience of around twenty people, and one naked – completely hairless – performer. It is a piece of undeniably unique theatre and a genuine pleasure to watch.
It's split into eleven scenes, each giving a portrait of the life of a different gay man. One is a man quibbling with himself about whether he should enter the dark room at a club, and getting into a fight with the person he’s seeing about the fidelity and seriousness of their relationship. The scene provided some interesting insight into conflicting attitudes towards the rather obscure underworld of the ‘darkroom’ and rung some painfully accurate bells about tense confrontations that emerge in relationships. Another followed a naked, drunk football hooligan as he swung around a lamppost. It was very cleverly constructed because the drunk addressed the audience directly, which meant that we became implicated in the story and were almost characters ourselves. He started calling us gay for looking at him and proceeded to reel off a disturbing though impressive onslaught of insults for gay people. He sort of slipped out of character during the torrent and became quite camp, but that worked well as it added to the surreal atmosphere. The twist at the end of the scene was a little cliché, but that made it no less enjoyable to watch and it was performed remarkably well.
Some of the less engaging scenes included a long Shakespearean-esque speech from King Edward (apparently England’s gay king) which was just quite hard to follow. At one point the King pretended to stick a rod up his bum which was very disconcerting, particularly as the reasons he’d gotten to that point were obscure. The different voices were wrapped up cleverly at the end with a scene set on ‘Pride’ day – another naked gay man talking about how he wished the day was still a day for gay people to celebrate their sexuality. He subtly referenced all the characters he’d brought to life in the past forty-five minutes which sewed the whole piece up and made a tight, coherent piece of theatre.
Marin Lewton, who single-handedly performed the show, was the reason it was such a success. His acting was, on the whole, really good, although at points it could have benefitted from a little more subtly of expression and emotion. His demeanour was unassuming which made him compelling – I never wanted to take my eyes off him and I was always eager to see which twists and turns the soliloquies would take.
Andrew McKinnon’s staging also deserves praise. Lewton changed his location in the room between the scenes, meaning the audience had to shuffle, swivel and re-situate. This gave the show a unique twist and kept the atmosphere energetic.
The show provided engaging insight into the huge spectrum of characters and contexts which constitute the gay scene and is well worth a watch.
