Quentin Crisp: Naked Hope

Quentin Crisp is supremely quotable, even if quips like “gay pride is an oxymoron” feel as dated as the London police who put him in the dock for “importuning.” This one-man show sees director and performer Mark Farrelly exhume him in wittily sepulchral style, unleashing epigrams like a 20th Century Oscar Wilde.

He’s had plenty to work with, as unlike the doyenne of Reading Gaol, Quentin Crisp’s own appetite for autobiography extended far beyond ballads. Born Dennis Pratt to “middle-class, middle-brow” parents, Crisp reinvented himself as a self-described pansy of the purplest hues, claiming exhibitionism as his drug of choice. He earns his crust proto-voguing for evening art class matrons – director Linda Marlowe brilliantly imagines it here in his fluid, blue-lit interlude of poses. Then, he styles out the Second World War on a succession of American GI’s arms, becomes accidentally trendy in '60s Soho, and then less accidentally famous in the '70s when his autobiography The Naked Civil Servant is televised.

The second half of Farrelly’s script is weaker – a recreation of Crisp’s New York stage shows spun from sour quips and faintly ill-judged audience participation. And where no amount of jeering and beatings would tear Crisp’s rich velvet suits and gorgeous silk scarves from him, here, his pitch-perfect wigs presumably stole the budget from the crumpled tuxedo they top.

This production emphasises Quentin’s lonely latter years rather than showing him at his crisp best. Farrelly is blackly, elegantly compelling in a production that still doesn’t quite shake the dust from his subject’s prolific autobiographical output.

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