One-man show on life and love in a ‘hidden Ireland’

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

I’m not a drag queen but there’s a thriving scene in Limerick,” says writer and actor Myles Breen who returns to Galway next week with his one-man show, Language Unbecoming a Lady.

The show was originally written for the Limerick Pride parade in 2009, when it was meant to be performed over four nights, but it has since grown legs.

“Long legs,” says Myles with a laugh as he explains that it has toured all over Ireland and more recently went to New York where it was staged last year’s Origins Irish Festival.

He describes the piece as semi-autobiographical, adding that “some of it is robbed from other people’s lives and some of it is from my imagination”.

It’s a play that “tells one man’s from teenager to adulthood, falling in and out of love”.

Myles who is 51, grew up in Limerick at a time when to be gay was to be part of an underground scene, going to “little clubs down pokey side streets”, unlike now “when it’s much more open”.

The only role models for gay men then were Mr Humphries, the over-the-top camp character in the BBC sit-com Are You Being Served, and Larry Grayson the camp presenter of BBC’s The Generation Game.

“Now we have hurlers, politicians, and show business people,” he says.

Myles describes himself as being lucky in having supportive family and friends, “but in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a fairly grim time to be gay, anywhere in Ireland”.

Language Unbecoming a Lady explores growing up as gay man in 1970s when the central character Robert, who works in a bank, develops another life as a drag queen at night-time. His alter-ego, The Divine Diana, indulges her passions for singers such as Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand and Billie Holiday, and allows Robert to explore who he is.

“You need a persona who is braver than you and stronger than you and The Divine Diana is it,” Myles says.

Diana is the first character the audience meets in the play, hence its title, he adds.

“Then, as the make-up and dress come off, you get to see what’s under the artifice. And you realise that this creation of Robert’s helps and supports him, she is his guardian angel.”

The mask of Divine Diana allows him to delve into the character and address issues of identity in a way that that is both subversive and revealing.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.