in the arts
from March 2008

Costume drama is making a comeback on TV with the showing of Cranford and Lark's Rise to Candleford.

They present a visually attractive picture of nineteenth century rural life in market towns with national treasures like Judy Dench in bonnet and ribbons gossiping and bitching most of the day. This is a chocolate box representation of the past and easy viewing on a Sunday evening. But this idyllic view has been balanced to some extent by other versions of the period that reveal a darker, much more violent take on late Georgian and Victorian London.

City of Vice is a series based on the law enforcement activities of the Fielding brothers (one of whom wrote the rollicking novel Tom Jones) who acted as Westminster magistrates in the 1750s with Soho as part of their patch. One episode focused on a male brothel - or ‘molly house’ - in Soho with its exotic, cross-dressing inmates and the murder of a cruising clergyman with relatives in high places. The Fielding brothers use a gay West Indian member of their private police force to uncover the murderer. The plot is made more complex because ‘Jamaica Mary’ is the lover of ‘Miss Kitten’ who did the dirty deed - blackmailing the clergyman for money to keep silent about their liaison. The two lovers go through a marriage ceremony in the molly house. Miss Kitten in full wedding dress and powdered wig is played by Nigel Harman and a gorgeous concoction he looks too.

The couple act out a ritual of giving birth to a baby doll in full view of the company of pimps and rent boys. However, Jamaica Mary, Judas-like, betrays Miss Kitten to the law and he is hanged at Tyburn.

This storyline could come straight from the tabloid press today. The owner of the molly house, who fronts as a respectable bookshop owner, is forced to flee the country in the face of a homophobic mob. We are shown murky alley ways, the hypocrisy of clergy soliciting for sex but preaching against homosexuality. Jamaica Mary loses his job as a police agent because of his sexuality. Murder, muggings with the poor and marginalised turning to crime to make ends meet at a time when there is no welfare state is the subject matters for all the episodes in the series. It is interesting to see how current hate crimes have a historical precedent. But on the brigh tside perhaps, life inside the cocoon of the molly house is certainly colourful.

Later on in the nineteenth century as the industrial slums pushed the boundaries of London ever outwards, the murder rate is increased by the activities of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. His victims end up in Mrs Lovett’s distinctly tasty meat pies. This film, starring Johnny Depp as Todd and Helena Bonham-Carter as Mrs Lovatt, is a screen version of the Sondheim stage musical. This is a gloomy monochrome world of wet cobbles and dark alleys. Depp is a passable singer but plays the malevolent serial killer with a brooding gusto. He has no moral qualms, dispatching the judge who seduced his wife and the beadle who beat him up with a quick razor slash across the throat.

This is camp operetta at its best with the main leads as egotistical, self-centred individuals. It is a grotesque tragedy. The scene where human thumbs are see in the meat pies both repels and amuses. Everyone dies in the end in vast pools of stage blood. Todd’s hated rival barber played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the most revealing skin tight electric blue suit plays a stereotypical stage Italian with a heavy accent. There has to be a large gay following for Depp who will adore whatever role he plays on screen. Musicals with an OTT plot line are the staple diet of theatre-loving queens. This is the theatre of unreality but based on fact.

Northern gays do need to know that the streets of London are not paved with gold. However the point needs to be made that the Chatsworth estate in Manchester - the setting for Shameless does give the impression that we have moved far away from the refinement of Cranford. Amidst the Irish gang turf wars, scams defrauding social services, all day drunkenness, and truancies, one of the plot lines does involve the gay adventures of Ian and Mickey. A pink stretch limo offers the setting for boy trysts. The camera does not shy away from rough sex in a variety of bedrooms. But the community remains level-headed about everyone’s peccadillos and is tolerant about homosexuality so long as it’s not too in-your-face and in the open air. There is warmth in this estate that is perhaps unexpected.

These portrayals of gay life raise the question of whether we should be shy or brazen in expressing our sexuality in the face of a public that is nervous about men in skirts or young men enjoying sex without love.

At least the historical dramatisation is a good deal more lively that the prettified blandness of Cranford and Lark’s Rise but you can be sure that there were some gays in both these locations.

Nick TyldesleyM