Presented in the form of thirteen poems, written and delivered in everyday speech, this one-person show details the journey of our protagonist, and presumably that of the performer delivering it, Nick Ishmael-Perkins. The performance is as much of the body as of the narrative that body lived through and there’s a wonderful physicality throughout as Ishmael-Perkins moves and dances around the small island that is the set, wonderfully designed by Noemi Daboczi. The audience surrounds the stage, the island on which Ishmael-Perkins recounts and plays out the various episodes of his life as a queer child in Barbados and a queer youth in London. His energy is considered and well-tempered, bringing the scenes to life, and the experiences of a queer immigrant take centre stage with 
resplendent verve. The scene where he goes to a gay club in London only to discover they’re playing the pop records from his childhood in Barbados manages to be funny and moving and poignant in equal measure as we see how his body responds to the beats with an instinct that becomes second nature to him as a long-lost joy is recaptured momentarily. We’re taken through these emotional landscapes that map the terrain of this queer immigrant, the simulations, simulations, and assimilations of the queer diaspora. As Ishmael-Perkins explains in the program notes, the emphasis throughout the piece, and, beyond that a tenet of Wretched Theatre’s ethos, their approach to the stage; to theatre-making and queer storytelling in general: accent, which is more than the way one speaks, it is one’s cultural heritage. Workshops accompanying the performances are entitled ‘Making Theatre With Your Accent’ and Wretched believe that the accents of young immigrants are underrepresented in the theatre. These accents challenge mainstream world views and assumptions about othered subjectivities. Often voiceless, these untold stories require a space, a place, to be.
Whilst being unavoidably a small p political tale, its confessions are of an intimate nature, of a soul negotiating their existence with every step. The ways in which a brown-skinned queer boy might operate and navigate the various territories of their experience in different worlds as their life takes them from Barbados to London, or his changing relationships with parents and brother: these maps are drawn with finesse and great command of language.
This is a vibrant theatre, intent on transformation, insisting on the importance of each voice, each accent, accentuating difference and identity as compelling motors of our experiences and our narratives. Alongside the crucial work of Paul Mendez, Keith Jarrett, Campbell X, Travis Alabanza, to name only a few, Wretched Theatre and Nick Ishmael-Perkins are forging the way forward for queer diasporic storytelling. Long live the accent.
Nick Ishmael Perkins was performing A DOZEN THINGS I’D RATHER BE for Wretched Theatre
at Streatham Space Project London
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011), all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2022, Nick Ishmale Perkins, Streatham Space Project, Wretched Theatre
