[usr 3]
He bursts out of backstage like a cum-filled cannonball. His two worshipping go-go dancers – a twink and a super-fit cub who warmed up the Meraki Bar space – pivot their girdles his way to worship at his bulging biceps, remarkably firm for a man of sixty. Treat my butt crack as a welcome matt, he invites the small, intimately spread room.
We didn’t need Brent Thorpe to convince us he holds title as the Gayest Gay Man in Australia (or other more colourful titles) but he does – and with an utterly invigorating apologia to camp, to shamelessness, and to the tremendous existential riches that come with grabbing life by its balls. Nobody is too old to pop a pill and dance in a jockstrap at a club, he tells us. We look at him – astride the stage, radiating virility, a man of both benchpresses and books – and we know this truth to be self-evident.
Our host discovered he was a ‘Daddy’ (a fetishised older man, a la Pedro Pascal) not too long ago. And rather than shy away from the identity, he has embraced it, and many other things too. His already popular one-man show, which ran through Sydney WorldPride, takes us (by no linear route) on a journey through the revelations, encounters, adventures and episodes which have most impacted his essential self. The gay-bashing and perversions that defined his Catholic upbringing. The confronting and life-changing show he went to see with his grandmother (who, after the performance ended, said loudly: ‘the only clowns here tonight are US!’). His great mentor and friend, whose debauched schemes and devastating conversation drops Thorpe believes to be a dying queer art. (One such line: ‘I won’t need a hysterectomy any more, he fucked the uterous out of me‘).
Thorpe is a student and prophet of gay culture at its most camp (we even get a few footnote references throughout his performance) and his deliberate, political embodiment of liberated excess is inspiring. What makes the show most entertaining though perhaps, is his passion for the art of camp speech – as eloquent as it is filthy, charming as it is insulting.
Certain bits work better than others. He does storytelling better than he does re-enactments (of what a Straight Parade would look like), and though his song about a particularly sordid sex dungeon in Germany was witty and well-sung, I personally heard the phrase ‘soft serve brown caviar’ too many times. And there was a crowd participation dance interlude in the middle, which though fun, would’ve been better placed at the end. It felt odd loosening up only to be shooed off stage and asked to be an obedient audience member again.
A guide to ageing disgracefully, directed with vim by theatre veteran Adam Cook, Daddy is good dirty fun. But there’s also an urgency behind it too – like a religious converted, Thorpe is desperate to show the sleepy-eyed straight-and-narrows that there is a better way of life – just down this stairway, just through to this room of throbbing music and red mists… He is literally devastated at the nine-to-five drudgery of his tradie work mate, and it seems to appal and dismay him deeply that so many good people can’t escape the treadmill of conventional life.
Fresh from shows in Berlin, Edinburgh, Adelaide and more, Daddy is now on its way to the Melbourne Comedy Festival. It’ll make many folk laugh. But if it convinces just one person to get off Grindr and throw themselves into the night, it will have fulfilled its higher purpose.
DADDY is currently playing the Meraki Arts Bar.
