FutureQueer – King’s Head Theatre, London

Writer and Director: Alexis Gregory

With his sublime 2019 piece Riot Act, Alexis Gregory documented LGBTQ+ history through the recreation of interviews with key figures, from a participant in the Stonewall uprising to British 1990s AIDS activist Paul Burston. His new work, FutureQueer, looks forward, asking what the future for queer people might look like.

This speculation starts, though, with a look back to the creation of the classic disco hit I Feel Love. Pete Bellotte and Giorgio Moroder teamed up with Donna Summer to produce arguably the first pop hit to use electronic synths in place of the orchestral sweeping strings of previous disco numbers. As a result, 47 years later, it still feels modern and timeless. In 47 years’ time, it will be 2071 – but what elements of today will still feel current?

Despite kicking off his solo cabaret performance with a comically faux news report speculating what would happen if drag queens reading children’s stories in libraries did actually make the whole world gay, Gregory’s idea of the future is tempered with healthy pessimism. Given the retrograde steps of recent years, with rises in anti-trans activism presaging a resurgence of anti-LGBTQ laws, the future is unlikely to be rosy.

With climate change forcing an increase in migration for all nations and communities, queer people will be part of that global shift. Gregory looks at that possible, probable future with looks at the past and present, from the optimistic paean to the gay utopia of 1970s San Francisco in the Village People’s Go West to stories about families seeking to leave hard-right US states (especially Florida and Texas) because anti-trans laws place their family in danger.

Some of Gregory’s evening involves standalone works of performance art, including a monologue as Futara, a future drag avatar (“this is deepfake realness”). This kicks off a rumination on how technology and biology are already changing our relationships with our bodies, causing us to evaluate our own sense of identity in ways that LGBTQ+ people have had to do for decades past. Later, the performer recounts a rave in the gay cruising grounds of Hampstead Heath in which he feels comfortable about leaving the world of drugs and debauchery behind.

It is in these moments that Gregory feels most confident and assured. But the arching narrative of the evening comes in the form of an essay, leaning heavily on readings from music journalist Jude Rogers’ oral history of the creation of I Feel Love and from the book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz. These segments feel the least confident because they are devoid of Gregory’s cheeky humour, instead feeling like the driest of dry lectures.

Matters aren’t helped when Gregory seeks to complement his thesis with pictures, videos and web pages. It may be a byproduct of the King’s Head’s minuscule new cabaret space not yet having any A/V capabilities, but in lieu of the ability to project those elements, Gregory is reduced to loading them onto a laptop, which he then waves in the audience’s direction.

At one point, Gregory refers to FutureQueers’s previous work-in-progress run at the King’s Head’s old venue in the summer of 2023. If this is meant to imply that this outing is no longer a work in progress, that would be disappointing. This piece feels as if its disparate parts do not quite connect with each other. What connective material there is feels like it is not delivered with the confidence and slickness that Gregory’s original components deserve.

A key line from Rogers’ article about I Feel Love is that to create the future, you first have to imagine the future. It’s a theme to which Gregory returns frequently, sometimes more successfully than others. One hopes that there is a future where FutureQueer hangs together tightly and becomes a compelling, unmissable piece of thought-provoking cabaret. There, that’s the future imagined – now, one hopes that Gregory can create it.

Continues until 2 March 2024