The Journey into Striptease: Part 1

Back when they used to let me near children, and I was a happy Latin teacher, feminism was going through a strange time. Young women, who had high aspirations for their careers, and who would frequently demonstrate how little they needed a man, would frequently launch into anti-feminist rants. Meanwhile, the English Department were teaching “feminist criticism” as part of the advanced English curriculum – trite readings of texts according to some kind of objective, pro-female stance. It became obvious that feminism was being associated with this peculiar simplification and detached from its historical roots. Not only did this ignore the diversity of the feminist traditions, disconnect it from the campaigns towards political, financial and social equality and reduce it to a predictable narrative, it associated feminism with the pointless cod-academia of contemporary education. Effectively, its teeth were being pulled.

Fortunately, LadyFest was still a dynamic movement, and a quick trip to see Brat Mobile or Le Tigre could introduce another, vibrant feminism.

Further back, when I was toiling in the declensions and conjugations of Ancient Greek, feminism was having a splendid internal battle. Easily distracted from the hard work of learning my endings, I delighted in the fierce polemics of Mary Beard and Germaine Greer. I even did my dissertation on Medea as a heroine. In the real world – or at least in the broadsheets and culture shows – Camille Paglia and Andrea Dworkin squared up to claim the legacy of the Second Wave feminists. Paglia was all about sex, excitement and bravado, frequently hanging out with drag queens, strippers and Italian macho men. Dworkin was teaming with Catherine MacKinnon and drafting laws against pornography.

In an article from that period, Kathy Acker suggested that feminism had once been about the women’s right to say yes or no. Those two answers, she worried, had evolved into two separate and competing strands.

It was exciting.

The period between had been complex. Until a few years ago, many former leftists bemoaned the political shifts of the twenty-first century, feeling almost nostalgic for the dualisms of the 1980s, when Thatcher and Apartheid were Bad and the miners and Sandanistas were good. Happily ignoring the arms-dealers and New Labour’s superb corruption of the socialist ideal, they made their compromises with the state. Going into education, arts administration or finally getting that grant for their theatre company removed their teeth. You can spot them today: they are the ones who think that Labour are better than the Conservatives. Well, I admire their faith like I admire fundamentalist Christians. I am sure it is a consolation to them.

The transition from feminism as the radical response to an obvious patriarchal society towards a media misrepresentation of lesbian man-haters (something it hasn’t been since 1974) was being completed. I woke up in 2005, roughly the time that I kicked the education habit and starting mainlining performance art, and found that burlesque and striptease were acceptable entertainment. While I remember reading in Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves that the advance of women’s rights in Greece was accompanied by more explicit representations of tits and arse in art, I wasn’t sure whether this was okay. The last time I had looked, striptease was shoved into Soho alley-ways, and was likely to involve getting threatened for your credit card by a burly bouncer. Suddenly, I could go and see women disrobe before an audience of enthusiastic women. I didn’t even have to be ironic.

Of course I decided to make cabaret part of my performance portfolio of interests.

Gareth K Vile Is Unwell

He lost his leg thanks to drinking. He had 500 lovers. He invented a style of writing that jumped from journalism to memoir and back again, made horse racing sound exciting, chronicled the dying days of British Bohemia fucked up his marriages and pissed his talent up a backstreet somewhere in Soho. He spent more time in court than Johnny Cash, cuckolded his best mates and received letters of complaint from the press. His writing was passionate, self-deprecating, unrepentant, elegant and intelligent. When I grow up, I want to be Jeffrey Bernard.

In the meantime, that comedown off the Happy Pills is giving me aches. I can't sleep so well, I have taken a week off chasing round for Radio Hour interviews - Nick Spag is on that for the rest of the year - and I have decided my time is better spent on arranging meetings with the doctor and various social service offices.

This might explain why I am in the Upper Circle of the Theatre Royal, surrounded by Glasgow's Other Theatrical Community - the one that likes a Big Night Out, rarely sees nudity on stage and isn't too excited by the National Review of Live Art. It freaks me out to be the youngest person in sight. My bald patch excites no comment. I am glad I didn't bring a date, blowing my cover as a young hipster as my real peers settle down beside me, blue rinsed and sucking on the Werthers.

Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell has become a piece of British Heritage. It stars that guy who played Jesus on TV - you know, he made that detective series with Jasper Carrot. He gets to wonder about, being Bernard, enjoying the anecdotes that Keith Waterhouse adapted for the stage. A cast of five come in and out, ghosts to illustrate particular stories, all RADA posh voices and 1970s London Commoner. They just slow the show. I'm here to hear tales of Soho, as it was before it got clean. 

The play was written in 1989, the butt end of Soho's golden years. Bernard hung out with whores, gangsters, alcoholics, artists, all the romantic stereotypes and mocked the stability of Middle England, the Middle Classes, the mediocre and the acceptable. He turned up pissed to the opening - or is that a legend? - and enjoyed the fame the play brought him. Then he had his leg chopped off and died in the 1990s. The ending, where he remembers his dead buddies, now has the poignancy of a lament for Bernard himself, as well as the way of life - indolent and cultured - that he loved.

The irony now is that the play - if not the person - is enjoyed by those people who would be horrified to have a pissed up Bernard smoking on their couch. And the time he laments was the era of oppression, before corporate lap-dancing clubs replaced the seedy strip-bars and the pub stank of ash. And all the adventures, usually involving sickened women or turf accountants, would be boorish shite without Bernard's own love of language. It is as if he learnt to drink like an alcoholic so he could still turn a fine phrase with a bottle of vodka inside him.

The play doesn't need the plush set - although it is nice - or the other actors. This is a glorious monologue, resolutely defiant: Robert Powell has a direct rapport with the audience that allows him to hide his character's moral turpitude behind a winning charm. It belongs, more obviously, in the grubby, marginal, theatres, the material militating against the ambience of the august Theatre Royal. Maybe, just sometimes, a good script is enough to make that breakthrough into the mainstream.

Still, it's still not safe for work: Bernard is as foul-mouthed as a Crazy Gary and while the pace and finale make this a requiem for a sentimentalised past, that past is littered with unapologetic conflicts and a quiet revolutionary spirit that mocks Marxist and Conservative with equal enervation. It is worse that I remember some of the Soho Bernard represents, as if my life has been a journey I have not noticed happening, only to find myself cast up on a further shore, wondering when my home was eroded by other waves.