Wild(e) Tales: Tales From the Shadows ☆☆☆
Vault Festival, Waterloo

It’s no secret that I worship and adore Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, so it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I took my seat for this shadow puppet show of some of his children’s stories, originally written for his two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, especially after reading that the role of Wilde would be performed by someone calling themselves Crystal Bollix. And then there’s that awful, ugly bracket around the (e) – why?

Things didn’t bode well. But as it turned out, the 40 minute show by the Shadow Gals was enchanting, and Crystal Bollix (Alexandra Christle) made a very charming Oscar.

The stories ranged from the well-known (The Selfish Giant, The Remarkable Rocket) to the less celebrated, each delivered by one of the Gals, all displaying the most melodious Irish accents. The shadow puppets were sweet and Olde Worlde low-tech and the children in the front row seats looked on enraptured.

I wasn’t sure why a lobster had been added to the mix, and the ending is rather ineffectual – after the Gals cajole Oscar into telling his own story, I thought we might get a history lesson in homophobia and institutionalized bigotry for LGBT History Month but instead Oscar stays uncharacteristically mute, so the children go away not knowing he went on to become a Queer Icon and template for the twentieth century queen, which is a crying shame as far as I’m concerned.

Review by Jonathan Kemp

Queerguru 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).