Queerguru’s Andrew Hebden’s first ☆☆☆☆☆ review of 2022 is for PASSION FRUIT

Some young performers have to write their own pieces in order to give themselves work. In Passion Fruit Dior Clarke, and co-writer Stephanie Martin may have written themselves a career. 

The New Diorama Theatreis hidden amongst the corporate tower blocks of Euston Road with a large flyover between it and the glamour of Eurostar. It’s’ a small theatre which means tickets for this fizzing, fresh, and funny semi-autobiographical tale of post code battles, toxic mandem masculinity, and bouncing between the top and bottom of the London black gay scene will be hard to come by. Don’t miss out. 

Romeo (Dior Clarke) loves to paint his mum’s nails in her favourite colour, Passion Fruit, but as he gets older his brother, his mum, and the dutty dogs she dates start to have opinions about what a real man should be spending his time on. The general consensus is that it’s pussy and pum pum, not a double gel coat. He tries it with a girl and thanks god when his teen peen can rise to the occasion and save his reputation with the bredren. Romeo thinks he can slide under the gaydar until the beautiful Aaron (Hayden Mampasi) joins his school and he death drops into the puckered lips of love.

The writing avoids the artificiality of poetry but borrows from its rhythms, its rhymes, and its ability to make the mundane magical. A constant, tugging momentum forward from the language is matched by the onstage choreography of the performer’s bodies. Just like the language is not quite poetry the action is not quite dance, but still makes the best use of its vitality and the interplay between performers.

While Romeo is played compellingly by the fantastic and flaming Clarke throughout, the other two performers (Charlotte Gosling and Mampasi) switch between a host of other characters in a dazzling display of accents and mannerisms that fill the stage to bursting. Each character emerges from a stereotype and then lands on the right side of truth over trite. Refreshingly both performers slide effortlessly between genders in a way that adds to, rather than detracts from, the characters they embrace. 

Passion Fruit is a love story. Not between two men but between the cultures that Romeo straddles. It is a threesome between Jamaican heritage, London and the gay scene. Each brings its own baggage but the care and humor with which they are unpacked should not be missed.