LGBT History Month 2025 – Queer Theatre By Dr. Emily Garside.

Queer theatre has always been here. It’s just often had to be…hidden. 

We talk about Oscar Wilde and his iconic works, which are considered coded Queer plays. They have Queer undertones, ways of reading them that are Queer but they were never overtly so. This is because they couldn’t be…

Until 1968, British theatre was subject to strict censorship, with the Lord Chamberlain’s office needing to approve all plays for performance.  The law claimed to be to protect audiences from ‘ indecent, offensive, or blasphemous content.’ and of course, this included anything with a Queer theme. This often seemed to be a particular focus for law enforcers. 

Like Wilde, there were many other Queer theatre artists in the UK, working and achieving remarkable success even against this backdrop. While most were not publicly ‘out’ beyond their circle, we can discern Queer themes in their work. This includes the works of John Gielgud, Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, and Terrence Rattiga, all of whom were gay men.

The publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957, which recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality, began to change things for Queer people in the UK, but also for theatre.  1958 a year after the legal change, and Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey was performed at Stratford East, marking a watershed moment for Queer theatre. Featuring a gay character, Geof, who was presented sympathetically and without moral judgment or consequences. This representation was a turning point for queer theatre on mainstream stages.

It wasn’t until 1968 that the law in Britain finally permitted Queer topics to be presented on stage. However, this did not immediately create a demand for Queer-themed works in the West End. Instead, Queer artists continued to work in fringe theatre, where they had been active before, but now with a bit more freedom to be overt in their expression, gradually becoming even more explicit. 

In a dark twist of dramatic irony, the year 1967 marked both the legalisation of queer theatre and the tragic murder of playwright Joe Orton by his partner. One can only speculate about the queer works we might have experienced from the author of “Loot” and “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” had circumstances been different.

In the 1970s, the UK witnessed the emergence of its first major queer theatre company, the Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company. The company aimed to challenge the prevailing perceptions of homosexuality.

The AIDS pandemic created a new wave of Queer Theatre, angry activism, and memorial combined in one. Things were different in London to the US, where healthcare and government approaches varied. However—the approach used art- specifically theatre- as activism. 

The first play produced in Britain to address the AIDS crisis was Louise Parker Kelley’s Anti Body in 1983. The first play in the West End about AIDS was Larry Kramer’s searing activist piece, The Normal Heart. The National Theatre played its part in AIDS activism by being the home of the world premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play they helped develop. That play, in particular, showed solidarity through theatre on both sides of the Atlantic when the National produced it at the same time as the Broadway production. Other plays like  Robert Chelsey’s Night Sweat or Janet Hood and Bill Russell’s Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens catalogued the pandemic and its devastating effect on the community. Later in the mid-1990s, Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg took a typically British dark humour approach to the pandemic, too (a play that never really found success in the US for that reason). 

The 1990s saw a combination of more ‘mainstream’ imported and successful home-grown works. It saw the London premiere of the iconic Queer musical Jonathan Larson’s Rent, as well as the London premiere of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. These, along with the premiere of Manchester playwright Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing, showed a gradual ‘mainstreaming’ of Queer theatre in London and regionally. From Wales, Peter Gill was becoming a prominent playwright, with Queer themes present in works like Cardiff East which also had a production at the National Theatre. Meanwhile, the more avant-garde, niche works thrived in places like The Drill Hall, which saw work from performance artists with Queer focus like  Djola Bernard Branner, Brian Freeman and Eric Gupton, otherwise known as Pomo Afro Homos (Postmodern African American Homosexuals) – their show Fierce Love played at the venue in 1992.

As we move on into the 2000s, we see a proliferation of Queer theatre companies as artists became more comfortable being themselves on stage and as theatres began to see the commercial viability of Queer works. Above The Stag (founded in 2008) quickly became a hotspot for Queer works, while other venues like the Soho Theatre and Southwark Playhouse also desiccated themselves to LGBTQ+ programming. We saw mainstream plays also on big stages take on LGBTQ themes, including the iconic and hugely successful The History Boys by Alan Bennett- another playwright who previously had been more ‘coded’ in his queer themes was not including Queerness front and centre in his works, demonstrating a shift in attitudes and comfort level of playwrights. 

Musicals have begun to truly embrace Queerness on stage, too, not nearly as much for a genre that is by nature camp, but progress is progress. In the 1990s, both Drag-inspired La Cage Aux Folles and AIDS-era Rent struggled with longevity in the West End; however, now British set musicals including Kinky Boots, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Death Drop and &Juliet all have thrived in London and on tour and proving that musicals at last, are perhaps embracing their Queer roots. 

Where next for Queer theatre? We’re in a strange time where, externally, the politics and conservatism of the world at large seem to feel like a dangerous time for theatre makers getting their voices heard. However, times of adversity also see theatre thrive as a way to raise their voice against that. We had the first Transplaywrightt – Jo Clifford- have a West End play in 2012. And we have an array of Queer writers, composers and performers working in our theatres. So it feels like hope that Queer voices will continue to be raised in British theatre and, of course, produce brilliant entertaining works.