Queer icon Jonny Woo takes us home to his childhood suburbia in Kent where even the net curtains can’t keep out Thatcher’s homophobic rhetoric. The young Woo tries to drown out her speeches by turning up The Eurovision Song Contest on the family TV. The camp singing competition offers some relief to the days of Clause 28 and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Dressing up in women’s clothes also helps, and, in a way, Woo has never looked back.
But in his new 70-minute show, Woo does exactly that: he looks back to pivotal moments which made him the man he is. Some memories are mundanely evocative, like the smell of the perfume worn by his mother’s best friend wafting over him in the back seat of the car on his way to school as he tries to forget the sheets he still wets in the middle of the night. Or like his Saturday job in the local shop where he picks up the nickname that he now uses as his stage name.
Woo’s lyricism ensures that these scenes from his youth are vivid and real. He recalls that his legs are crossed like an ‘unsolved puzzle’; skies are ‘apricot’; and rooms are filled with ‘objets d’art and religious things’. His narrative of nascent sexuality will be familiar to anyone growing up in the suburbs in the late 20th Century and then moving to London during the Rave scene. Woo lists the different kinds of ecstasy pills with reverent nostalgia.
However, this is also a story of self-destruction and survival, where the two often become the same thing. Woo doesn’t shy away from stories of unsafe sex and drug-fuelled nights at the much-missed LA club in Shoreditch. Can his behaviour be traced back to his first sexual encounter back in the suburbs? Was his history teacher right after all? ‘I know that you can do better.’
Suburbia is honest, raw and powerful, but in Woo’s hands, and in his borrowed dresses, the story is life-affirming and ultimately joyous. Perhaps the New York sections could do with some more refining as, at the moment, they seem abstract and confusing compared to the earlier lucid recollections centred around Chatham and Shoreditch. But by the end, it doesn’t matter. Woo is a survivor and his testimony is vital.
Runs until 25 January 2025