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On a cold, bleak Friday morning outside inner-western Sydney’s art deco Enmore theatre, the Melbourne-born comedian and singer Reuben Kaye spontaneously climbs on to the box office window ledge. His chiselled face is free of its stage armoury of lipstick and rouge, although he jokes the shade of his flamboyant jumper is somewhere between cyan and turquoise, “like a first draft of one of the colours of the Pride flag”.
The raunchy and cuddly sweater sports a huge leather man’s face by the queer artist Tom of Finland, and Kaye, 41, rolls up his sleeve to show a forearm tattoo of another of the late artist’s drawings of a sailor, whom Kaye thinks of as “never quite knowing where home is”, a feeling he relates to as a travelling performer.
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In the 1990s, Aunty Sandra Saunders and Aunty Ellen Trevorrow were among the Aboriginal leaders protesting the proposed building of a bridge from the South Australian mainland near Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island—known to Indigenous peoples as Kumarangk—because on this isle, cultural information sacred to Ngarrindjeri women was kept.
“It was unrelenting, like we were under siege,” recalls Aunty Sandra, 78, from her home at Wangary (on Nauo land), where she paints using acrylics and oils on hardboard and Belgian linen. “It didn’t matter which way you turned; we were under fire all the time.”
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The play begins with Simon Burke’s bare arse, facing the audience and bouncing side to side in time with David Bowie’s The Jean Genie. In this new production of a queer Australian classic, the actor is playing 56-year-old elocution teacher Robert O’Brien in stockings and suspenders, rouge on his face, caressing himself before a poster of Mick Jagger.
While teaching, O’Brien wears a fusty green vest and brown suit and tie that blend with his living room furnishings; in private, cigarette in hand, he resembles Norma Desmond in cloth cap and dressing gown.
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