Review by Mark Fisher
Venus As A Boy
8 Aug 2007 in Dance & Drama
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 3 August 2007
Tam Dean Burn in Venus As A Boy.
WE LOVE TO see transformation in the theatre. The power of “let’s pretend” stays with us from our childhood. We never cease to delight in the magic of a storyteller who makes one thing become another before our eyes.
For these reasons, Luke Sutherland’s short novel, Venus as a Boy, published in 2004, offers fertile material for the stage.
It is a story of transformation, of what the novelist calls “human alchemy”, as a young man from Orkney comes of age and makes the journey south to Edinburgh and on to London where, having given countless people transformative sexual experiences in his guise as Désirée, he becomes fatally sick with a mysterious illness that turns his skin into gold.
Tam Dean Burn, in his own adaptation for the National Theatre of Scotland, plays further with the idea of transformation in his compelling solo performance. Introducing the play as himself, with the multi-talented Sutherland providing an excellent live score of looped guitar and violin, the actor makes it quite plain that he is not Désirée, nor in other circumstances would he ever be cast as such a beautiful Orcadian boy.
Yet, with the skill of a master storyteller, he draws us into Sutherland’s story with its tales of racism, violence and casual sex in South Ronaldsay; of prostitution, drug-taking and camaraderie in a cross-dressing Soho brothel; and of friendships forged against the odds in a world not accustomed to Désirée’s quasi-religious ability to give intense physical love. As he does so, Burn too transforms himself, taking on the clothes and make-up of the drag queen and becoming beautiful in the process.
Co-directed by Burn and Christine Devaney, it is a one-man show that never feels short of actors. Burn’s performance is carefully modulated, sensitive to the flow of humour, anger, uncertainty, jealousy, humiliation and joy that the story carries with it.
All the while, there is a subtle interplay between him and Sutherland, providing the soundtrack for his own novel. The result is a performance of a strange and fascinating tale that is as beguiling in its own way as the original book, which shows the ugliness behind the beauty of Orkney and the beauty behind the ugliness of London.
© Mark Fisher, 2007
