Direction and Choreography: Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel
The need for acceptance and recognition drives many an artist; the insecure seek security in audience applause. Those needs are paralleled in many a queer person’s life, too: however outrageous or sedate their lives, the fear of rejection is never far away.
That need for artistic validation drives Who Hurt You?, a work by Bullyache (Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel), which uses the duo’s original songs as a backbone for an exploration of the boundaries between the sort of queer art that sticks a middle finger up at the audience, while simultaneously craving its applause. It’s a bold, appropriate choice to open the Southbank Centre’s short KUNSTY season, a four-day celebration of “rad, queer and uncategorisable performances”.
Who Hurt You? checks all three of those boxes. It’s part pop concert, with Deyn performing songs either as guitar solos or with deep electropop stylings. But it’s also dominated by drag queen Barbs, who makes her entrance by faceplanting onto the stage and, throughout, displays a knack for physical comedy.
It is when Barbs sits down at the stage’s grand piano and plays that one first realises that there may be something very different happening. Her rendition of a Shostakovich piano concerto movement is moving, although the f-bombs she drops as she supposedly struggles with some of the piece’s finer moments lend it an aggressively comedic air.
Barbs later performs a lip-sync – now, thanks to Drag Race, regarded as a drag prerequisite. Her rendition of Whitney Houston’s All the Man That I Need is lewd and silly, but also involves one of the show’s two dancers getting caught up in the microphone cable and being strangled by it as Barbs blithely continues.
We do get some more conventional elements. A pas de deux by dancers Sam Dilkes and Frank Yang combines elements from various Latin styles from the ballroom repertoire, from Argentine Tango to Cha cha and everything in between, charging them with a sense of eroticism that one is unlikely to ever witness on Strictly Come Dancing.
But it is the movements that break with, and play with, convention that work best. At one point, Deyn takes his place in the stalls, acting as a bored director putting Dilkes and Yang through their dance paces before callously firing the former and ordering him off the stage. That has consequences for the thin veneer of narrative worn by a piece that otherwise is more a sequence of segues.
Despite the bitty nature of Who Hurt You?’s core elements, there is a sense of flow between them. At times, the work feels like a defiant rage against the constraints of narrative dance; at others, the sense of self-indulgence threatens to erupt, only to barely subside a moment later.
Thought, though, there is a demand for recognition, an absolute self-belief, and vehement insistence on acceptance. “This is queer art, not pantomime!” Barbs snaps at the audience at one point, as they deign to laugh at her deliberately comedic antics. And she’s not wrong. Who Hurt You? is, indeed, art.
Reviewed on 5 November 2025
KUNSTY runs until 8 November at Southbank Centre
