JADAR

★★★☆☆

Pleasure Rebellion, directed by Scarlett Spicer and produced by So La Flair Theatre in collaboration with Night People and Beg, Steal & Borrow, positioned itself as a “theatrical extravaganza” dedicated to queer joy, ritual excess, and Dionysian indulgence. The promise was bold: to bring nightlife aesthetics into a theatrical frame, and to collapse the boundaries between cabaret, ritual, and performance art. What emerged was an evening of participatory  spectacle that thrived on energy, personality, and ethos—but which faltered when judged by theatrical craft.

From the beginning, the audience was cast not as passive observers but as co-conspirators. A ritual mantra—“I vow to live in eternal pleasure, I vow to live in radical joy. My pleasure is my legacy. My pleasure is my rebellion”—was taught, repeated, and refracted across the evening, functioning
as a kind of communal spell. Its incantatory rhythm underlined the production’s desire to create ritual theatre: not a story to be absorbed but a collective act of transformation.

Spectators were invited to clap, cheer, shout, and, most memorably, to strut down a catwalk. These moments of role-reversal—when audience members briefly became performers—were liberating, playful, and deeply in tune with the ethos of queer nightlife, where self-display and mutual affirmation are key currencies. This participatory framework established an atmosphere of exuberant permissiveness.

Yet it also highlighted the production’s central tension: the balance between experience and theatre. As an event, Pleasure Rebellion succeeded in immersing its audience in a mood of carnivalesque joy. As a work of theatre, however, it lacked the dramaturgical rigour needed to sustain momentum or deepen its ideas.

The performers brought rawness, reflecting the eclectic makeup of Manchester’s queer scene. Aaron and Daisy Howell, performing as Chardonnay and Rose, punctuated the evening with bursts of high-energy dance, effectively functioning as the show’s pulse. Bon Appetit, already familiar to many from Firehouse, embodied drag cabaret glamour with ease, offering a sheen of professional
polish. Bobbie Twaddle’s “runaway bride” routine leaned into classic drag comedy, its humour broad but effective. The more introspective pieces, however, were uneven.

Tysie Blaque stormed the stage with a high-octane drag performance, serving attitude, precision, and sheer physical stamina. Dancing the house down, she electrified the room with a combination of fierce choreography and commanding presence that had the crowd roaring. Willow Stone’s testimony about finding belonging in Manchester was touching, and her sincerity grounded the evening in lived experience.

In contrast, Sujata’s monologue—charting a journey of migration, queerness, and self-discovery—contained some of the most powerful lines of the night, particularly the refrain “My body is not your politics.” This phrase crystallised the intersection of personal experience and political oppression with striking clarity.

Yet the piece suffered from overextension. Its potency was diffused by repetition and length, with the dramaturgy unable to match the force of its content. The audience shifted from rapt engagement to restlessness, an indicator that the emotional arc had plateaued before it concluded.

Threading these disparate elements together was Eleanor Haigh, playing Dionysus’ mother and acting as host, guide, and occasional provocateur. Haigh’s performance was the production’s keystone: witty, commanding, and possessed of the kind of cabaret charisma that can turn fragmentation into cohesion. Where the evening risked feeling like a revue stitched together from Manchester’s nightlife acts, Haigh’s presence lent a through-line of ritual mischief. Without her anchoring presence, the show would likely have collapsed into episodic variety rather than functioning as a collective performance.

The evening closed with Haigh’s lip-sync to ‘Hymne à l’amour’, offered as a tender dedication to Manchester, after which the audience was welcomed onto the stage to dance, celebrate, and mingle freely with the performers in a final gesture of shared joy.

Yet despite the energy onstage, the production under-delivered visually. Erin Thomas’s stage design—a small raised platform, a handful of suspended stars, and a projection screen—felt thin, unable to conjure the decadence and ritual chaos associated with Dionysus. Likewise, Thea Holmes’s costumes gestured toward spectacle without fully embracing it. Sparkle and sensuality were present but inconsistent, often reliant on the performers’ charisma rather than design choices.

This stripped-back aesthetic might be understandable for a low-budget, short-run production, but it sat uneasily with the promise of an “extravaganza.” The gap between expectation (decadent excess) and delivery (functional minimalism) made itself felt. The dramaturgy, too, betrayed the production’s dual identity as both nightlife and theatre. The cabaret form thrives on variety and surprise, but in a theatrical context, it requires careful shaping to avoid monotony.

Pleasure Rebellion offered moments of exhilaration—audience chants, bursts of dance, cathartic storytelling—but these were sometimes undermined by a lack of pacing. Peaks of energy were followed by lulls, and while the show celebrated excess, its dramaturgy needed sharper discipline to ensure indulgence did not drift into indulgence for its own sake.

Where Pleasure Rebellion excelled was in its ethos. It captured something essential about queer nightlife: its ability to create spaces of temporary utopia, where hedonism is not trivial but radical, where joy becomes defiance, and where identity is performed without shame. The atmosphere was infectious, and by the end of the evening, audiences left smiling, buzzing, and connected—a rare and valuable achievement.

As theatre, however, the production remained closer to raw material than finished form. Its authenticity, vitality, and cultural resonance are undeniable, but its craft—the design, dramaturgy, and pacing—lags behind. In this sense, the show is less a final product than a compelling sketch, a promise of what might be achieved if Manchester’s nightlife energy were given the resources, dramaturgical shaping, and visual scale it deserves onstage.

Nevertheless, Pleasure Rebellion delivered on its title: it was pleasurable, rebellious, delicious, and joyously queer. But as an “extravaganza,” it was only half-formed.

The night succeeded as a communal event and cultural affirmation; as theatre, it revealed both the possibilities and the current limitations of merging nightlife with performance art. It was fun, raucous, and affirming—but also a reminder that pleasure alone does not make for fully realised theatre.

Pleasure Rebellion runs at Home (Theatre 2) until September 30.

Photo: Kitwaah