The Yard
As you might have guessed from the title, this will be a reasonably adult review, for a very adult show. So, snatch the paper away from your 7-year-old, or turn off their iPad.
Done? Have they gone? Now it’s just us grownups. As Storm Darragh rattled around outside, another maelstrom was raging inside The Yard. Added cushions and heating proved to be a welcome winter treat before the show started. A subtly transgressive half-living room greets, with “cameras” pointing inward, and a pink tree spouting snow stage right. It’s as if Christmas threw up all over the set, which is fitting considering what follows.
Dan Wye returns as Séayoncé, the witchy/mystic/ghost-whispering drag queen, international star, and adversary of Christmas. Resembling a hard-partying Norma Desmond, she billows on stage in velvet kaftan, turban, and obliterated makeup. Robyn Herfellow as Leslie-Ann the murderous felon pops up from behind a drinks cabinet that is also the piano and begins plonking away in a sequin dress, shaved forehead and ponytail. Quite the pair. So begins their TV special… or so they think.
We cleave straight into one of the most shocking, heinous, inappropriate, offensive, and utterly uproarious evenings I have spent in years. Maybe it’s the sands of time slowly slipping through my hourglass, but the relentless cheer and heteronormativity of well… the nativity season is beginning to gnaw on me. Do I sometimes fantasise about pouring hot butter into carollers from an upper-story window? Or burning Christmas trees as kiddies look on in tears, I think we all do, don’t we?
Séayoncé has crafted the perfect antidote. Eye-wateringly filthy jokes, debauchery, blasphemy, calumny, and all the other bad -my’s make us complicit and garnering us a place on Big Red’s naughty list. Wooden spoonfuls of “Ketamine” pummel the evening on, and we get more and more embroiled in the duo’s twisted yet strangely comforting fever dream.
Serrated writing, Wye is a born comic, with fabulous timing, owl-like swivel of her head, and a slow heavy blink of her glitter-laden eyelashes. The songs are inventive twists on the Christmas classics that you certainly haven’t heard before. Santa being into Bestiality? Jesus and Judas meeting on Grindr? A very smutty choir session? We are emboldened by the badness, and the laughs and blood-alcohol level of the audience rises considerably as the evening goes on.
It’s not all guilty chuckles and venom however. Oli Fuller’s set is a little too small for the space leaving a rather large gap stage left. Despite Séayoncé’s impressive presence and adequate voice she is a park and bark queen, moving between the stuffed armchair stage left and centre stage. This would be fine apart from the fact that she is resorting to cue cards for some sections. A Madonna-style mic situation for both performers would mean more movement and less faffing about with clunky handheld mics.
Although this from me is Pedanticism at it’s most scrougely as a little like the Grinch in drag, the duo set out to battle Christmas, capitalism, and Clapham gays. Ending on a small heart warmer about acceptance and queer joy. This is much needed as two acts of cynicism and bum jokes could wear a person down. As Séayoncé croons her maxim “pray the gay to stay” we swayed in unison realising our luck at the myriad alternatives to the mainstream narrative, both theatrically and personally. Happy New Queer to you all, everyone, I just hope I don’t receive coal in my stocking on the 25th for all the guffawing I did at SÉAYONCÉ’S PERKY NATIVITITTIES (what? It’s just the title).
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