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69 Shades of Dramaturgy: Stuart Thomas @ Oran Mor

69 Shades of Gay!

by Stuart Thomas

Meet Aiden, the luckiest gay in G12. Because he’s about to shack up with boyfriend number 69, Marcus! So in time-honoured fashion, Aiden’s going through his phone, getting rid of texts, snaps, numbers, the apps… But there’s nothing like a mammoth deleting session to send a boy down memory lane…

This funny, frothy, fearlessly frank one-man show stars Gary Lamont, BBC’s River City favourite Robbie Fraser (the soap’s much loved gay hairdresser), and is written by Stuart Thomas, ‘one of the best comedy writers the Scottish stage has produced’ (The Scotsman), and the writer behind the smash hits, The Real Hoosewives fae Glesga, Wee Fat Glesga Wedding, and Salon Janette.

Oran Mor, Glasgow from the 8th - 18th February 2017

Obvious one first: what inspired the idea for the script?
My own life. It's the most autobiographical thing I have ever written, although I heavily raided the lives of my friends, both straight and gay, to give Aiden's private life a few more points of interest! But I wanted to say something really positive, and sex-positive, about gay life. But all my plays, even the ones about Glesga hoosewives, are to some extent autobiographical. This one just a little more so.


When we spoke before, you mentioned the influence of Reality TV - will audiences see this influence in 69 Shades?

Not really, other than in the abstract. I think Reality TV has made voyeurs of us all, and Aiden's openness about his sex life maybe owes something to that aspect of our culture. We're all stars in our own lives now, or so we think. Aiden does, that's for certain.


This show is going to the Oran Mor - a little different to the Pavilion, which we chatted about before. Does this impact on your approach to the script?

The play was originally written for a studio theatre space in Dublin, so it was tailored for that smaller, more intimate space. Also, The Pavilion has a very distinct audience, so it's more a case of me having to adapt my style to that venue, as opposed to the other way around. But comedy is comedy. It's all about making people laugh -- and think. So my intentions remain the same, whatever the venue.


A show like 69 Shades is pretty clearly about being gay - how far do you think we have come in the past decade in being able to be so clear about a character's sexual identity, and is there more to be done?

I think we've come a long, long way, but there is always more to be done. Writing this made me face a few of my own demons, in terms of being out and proud. Some of the comments on Facebook (especially in Ireland) made me realize that there's a ways to go, in terms of how problematic a play with a proud gay message still is for some people. 

This is slightly off topic, but worth sharing -- in Ireland, one of the critics (in an otherwise rave review) felt the play was missing a beat. So did I, but I didn't know what it was, but I was determined to find that beat for this Glasgow revival. Then Orlando happened. And as I did my rewrites, I realized that what the play was missing was a moment where Aiden stands up and is truly counted -- where he really owns his sexuality, beyond his sex life, and fuck the bullies past and present. 

That was a moment of revelation for me and I would really like to think that, in some small way, the speech in which Aiden says he's proud of who he is represents its own little push forward in terms of a character -- and a writer -- owning their sexuality.


I assume that the script goes for comedy - from the title, I admit: what attracts you to writing humorously?

It matters to me to make people laugh but not just laugh. Even the title has more than just comic value. Aden's enjoying his 69th relationship and he's sure this is the one, and of course, his desperation ensures that it's not. So there's the pretty low gag there, but also some meaning too. 

For me, real comedy lies in that sweet spot, where people are laughing because it's funny, but also because they feel something too, something universal. That's always been my aim, to make people laugh and feel, and I think the best comedy does that.


The script also has some moments of poignancy too, I hope. It's comedy with a bittersweet undertone, which is always my favourite kind of humour. There's always room for sadness in comedy; that's what gives comedy power... the aftertaste.

real action

In a real action, in which several people comerunning towards each other, all will positionthemselves in the most truthful way; but this arrangement is not always the most advantageousfor the painter, nor the most striking for the viewer. From that stems the need for the painter to alter the natural state and to reduce it to an artificial state: and will it not be the same on the stage?

Lessing Liked God and Drama

The story so far...

In his quest to discover the meaning of Dramaturgy, Gareth K Vile has gone back in time to the eighteenth century. Noticing that Lessing first used the term in the 1740s, he is tracing the relationship between Enlightenment thought and the functions of Dramaturgy. He's convinced that placing Dramaturgy within the context of its genesis, he'll be able to create a working definition that allows him to further his studies. 

My suspicion is that the past is constantly in a process of revision. Rather like in those X-Men adventures when a character goes back in time to prevent a particular event, which then changes history, contemporary thinkers re-evaluate their ancestors in an attempt to prove their own position.

I've been looking up Lessing, and just discovered the other academic discipline that is still interested in his writings. Turns out that the son of a preacher-man did some theology. In 1961, Irving Louis Horowitz examined Lessing's theology (Lessing and Hamann: Two Views on Religion and Enlightenment: Church History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Sep., 1961)). Far from being a complete religious sceptic, Lessing attempted to reconcile religious revelation and reason. He's kind of a compromise between the anti-clerical thoughts of Diderot and a more philosophical - and mystical - Christian tradition.

Apart from challenging the mythology of a 'secular Enlightenment', Horowitz's essay notes that Lessing identified God as 'immanent' rather than 'transcendental'. Roughly, his notion is that God exists within the Universe, and doesn't sit on a big throne stroking his beard. Immanence ranges across a wide set of models, from a pagan pantheism where God is the physical universe (and nothing more) to a Christian view of the divine as incarnated within the world. 

There might be a big 'so what?' about to follow, but here's the thing. The Enlightenment - say in Anthony Pagden's Big Cool Tome - is often interpreted as a break with religious thought. Kant's reply to the question 'what is enlightenment?' (TL;DR: 'grow up') is taken as a rejection of the 'authority through revelation model' encouraged by churches. But Lessing doesn't go that far. He sustains a dialogue with religious thought. 

He doesn't dethrone reason, but he does see it in collaboration with spiritual faith. His ability to integrate the two approaches makes him more Reasonable than some of the more explicitly atheistic thinkers, and while he locates religious sentiment within the personal rather than social sphere, he's not abandoning the Christian tradition for an all-new, sparkling godless universe. 

I fear we are still in the 'so what?' zone.

Well, there's the idea that continuity is important when considering the Enlightenment. Then there is the question of how a theological thinker might perceive theatre. Knowing that Lessing rejected the more Catholic notion of 'religion as social process' but accepted a personal engagement with the spiritual might help make sense of how he would then interpret various plays. It's all conjecture, but give it a chance...

What is Dramaturgy? One Thing....

Lessing attempted to turn the gestalt of the actor into a Lacanian mirror for the spectator, leaving the actor confronting the problem of trying to live up to the critic's demand.' 
Of Textual Bodies and Actual Bodies The Abjection of Performance in Lessing's Dramaturgy, Jurs-Munby 2005

Ah, the magic of academic writing. I might come back to this later, but a paragraph of introduction might be helpful...

Investigating the idea of Dramaturgy, I've ended up reading a great deal about The Enlightenment. That's a period of great

A Big Book (Unread)

philosophical debate that can be seen, depending on your preference, as the first great explosion of rational, secular thought or a goddamned nightmare that led to the genocidal mania that marked the twentieth century. Lessing (Gotthold, not Doris) coined the word during his period as the in-house critic for a German national theatre in the 1740s, and I wanted to find out a bit more about the intellectual context in which he was writing. 

Lessing is one of the many thinkers who walks the Enlightenment beat. Son of a preacher-man, ripping off Diderot (whom he does compare to Aristotle), he rags on Voltaire and describes the various performances staged at his local. He had plenty of big ideas, but tends to be referenced more often than he is cited. We know he's a big deal, but his actual writing is less interesting than his status.

Jurs-Munby is being anachronistic by suggesting that Lessing had a Lacanian intention (Lacan was born, like, two centuries later), but her point is well-made. Lessing was interested in transforming the way that theatre was discussed, and claimed to have a special interest in the actors' performances. Since they were ephemeral, they deserved more attention than the script itself. Between slagging Voltaire's opinions on theatre - in a manner that borders on racist - Lessing critiqued the actors, until they started to get annoyed with his comments.

Voltaire as described by Lessing

Anyway, Jurs-Munby draws attention to something I'd call characteristic of the Enlightenment: an emphasis on the physical. When Lessing commented on the actors, he was stressing the importance of the actual event as perceived in time and space. He did plenty of plot summaries, too, and these are as functional as you'd expect.

The point of all this reading I did when other people were tucking into turkey and spuds is to discover what Dramaturgy might be, by placing it within its historical context. So, adapting Jurs-Munby, I'd venture...

that Dramaturgy concerns the performance of drama in 'real time', and the relationship between actor and audience. He encourages a reading of theatre as an event, not a script.

He does a bunch of other stuff, too, but I have had enough for one day.