Theatre: Queer as Flux

Written and performed by Stace Callaghan

Directed by Leah Mercer
Lighting designer Peter Young

Sound Designer Olivia Cosham

Blue Room Theatre October 26 -  November 13, 2021

There’s nowhere else to begin but with admiration – for the powerful and courageous life Stace Callaghan has lived and continues to live, for their emotional insight and poetic command of language, and the sheer energy and honesty of their performance.

Callaghan has taken the world head on – not because they have an axe to grind, a sermon to deliver or a point to prove, but because they are prepared to reach out for freedom, and to wear the scars that come with it.

Growing up in that big old dirty river town Brisbane in the 1980s was tough enough for any kid (I did it a couple of decades before then and it was no joke); behind the glitz of Expo on the South Bank and the maroon ecstasies of Lang Park and King Wally Lewis, there were the shadows of Bjelke-Petersen and Hinze, the white shoe brigade and Commissioner Terry Lewis.

For the queer community it was a hostile, even dangerous, place to be.

But Callaghan survived it, in some inward sense thrived in it, and the person who emerges so clearly as they tell their story, is an inspiration, not just to LGBTIQ+ people but to anyone who seeks freedom and change where it is not encouraged or even available.

Of course there are scars (and those who might struggle with physical ones should be warned – though not discouraged), and Callaghan is remarkably frank about those they has suffered and, by and large, overcome.

Such is their felicity with language, though, and such is their sweet soul, that the journeys they take us on have touching pleasure and sharp humour of their own.

So that transition, in the universal as well as the personal, is their purpose and subject (they delight in Transperth by the way), whether it’s the story of how their mum and dad have changed, or the last moments of their beloved dog.

And Queer as Flux has spirituality, anchored in Callaghan’s real life but aloft on their imagination; so a recurring encounter with whales on Hervey Bay in Central Queensland becomes a phantasmagorical meditation on ecology and change.

Leah Mercer, whose work with her The Nest Ensemble co-founder Margie Brown Ash has produced some of the most memorable Blue Room performances of the last decade, directs with astuteness and touch, and the interplay between light and sound (Peter Young and Olivia Cosham) is nanometre-perfect.

Unfortunately, somewhere in the process of organising Queer as Flux’s content, an awkward, superfluous character, the drag queen Polly Tickle, is injected into the narrative (though not Callaghan’s life, where Polly plays no discernible part).

Polly’s main purpose seems to be to provide a LGBTIQ+ historical context into Callaghan’s own story, but much of it is common knowledge and that which isn’t could have been left to Stace themselves to tell – much more effectively.

That aside, this is a powerful performance and an insight into lives lived differently, and bravely, that will reward your attention.