Shay Mace
In a sucker punch, erudite reading of her newly published poetry collection, Joelle Taylor offers a sensational kaleidoscopic nosedive into queer counterculture through the lens of four Butch, and one Femme, group of lesbians followed across a period of 50 years. It’s an endlessly engrossing tale, told through the lens of cinema and screenplay in its form, that is as intoxicatingly bright and brilliant as it is dark and wrathful. Adapting the lives of five women from her own lived experience, Taylor weaves threads of resistance, escape, sexuality, addiction, and violence into the patchwork of people who make, and are made by, the titular East London Queer dive bar.
Taylor is as formidable a writer as a performer – twisting and turning impossibly well through a maze of impossible dreams, self-actualisation, romance and sex. All of her characters begin their journey to the Maryville fleeing something, be it a mob attack in South Africa or the gendered expectations of a London upbringing, and soon find themselves suited, booted, and sat at the bar looking to forge a community out of their losses. As a follow-up to her previous work C+nto which featured the same characters, this vigorous and meticulous creation finds exceptional definition in the Scottish debut of its staged reading.
We had nothing, but we shared it all…
…becomes the rallying cry of a community that constantly has to tourniquet itself and one another within it, fighting to be seen and heard while simply trying to exist. Each line is drenched in metaphor and a potent miasma of grit, that punctuates lived realities alongside a dutiful care to create three-dimensional characters that come to a reckoning with their own predilections and temptations, whilst each having their loveable, identifiable characteristics, adventures and unravellings. Taylor clearly feels indebted to the forms of these characters, to give them their weight and depth but so often their levity, with fantastical humour arising from their mischief, and great compassion from their oppression.
Neil Bartlett directs Taylor’s movements around the stage with inventiveness and playfulness at heart, bringing to life each corner of the bar, and the distant spaces of un-belonging beyond it, with vivacity and detail. Taylor holds the audience like putty, at times taking moments to hold on specific reactions she has elicited and running with them, much to the joy of everyone in the room. The inherent lyricality of the script proves no hinderance, instead the stage comes abound with the colourful highs and destructive lows through Taylor’s unending vigour and performance stamina. You feel every beat reverberate around the stage and find itself back in your soul, with a kernel of truth in every rolling sentence, pause and crescendo.
Stunning visuals from artist and filmmaker Sweatmother delineate each era, as we meander from the 1957 to 2007 through the scars, dreams and winding paths of this community. They cornice the story gently, but equally find a rising rhythm as we head towards a moment of reckoning, in which Taylor lays back in a chair and stares up at the almighty screen. Its a phenomenal fusion of poetry, performance and visual media that forms an unwithering, unforgiving and unforgetting tribute, as much as it does an utterly absorbing anthology of stories.
It’s remarkable that Taylor and Bartlett fit so much into just under an hour, never leaping over any sensibility or skipping a beat. This is a heart-wrenching, rapturous piece of anthropology rendered into gorgeous queer art. Make no mistake, it is an unmissable and extraordinary experience to see Taylor in her element, and surely at a career prime.
Drop by the Maryville, and pour yourself a hearty pint of full-strength Bitter.
Moss Meunier
Maia Kahn
