Who was Quentin Crisp? George Nichols is the Assistant Director of Tom Stuart’s new play,
Who was Quentin Crisp? George Nichols is the Assistant Director of Tom Stuart’s new play, After Edward, a response to Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II for which George is also the Assistant Director. In this blog he looks at key characters from After Edward that were real people. At the heart of this he and the cast have been asking how much they should impersonate these real people and how much they should interpret them. Quentin Crisp (played by Richard Cant in After Edward) was born into an inauspicious suburban family, the son of a solicitor and a governess; however, he went on to live an extraordinary life. He is now best known as a raconteur, writer and actor whose appearance and personality defied gender norms. Crisp recounted that he was the subject of much bullying in his early life because of his effeminate behaviour. After leaving school in the 1920s Crisp moved to Soho where he met other young homosexual men and found more freedom to be able to wear women’s clothing and makeup. By his own account his appearance shocked Londoners and led to him being the victim of homophobic attacks. During this time Crisp also sold sex as a rent boy, he said in an interview later in his life that he was ‘looking for love, but found only degradation’. In the rehearsal room we’ve talked a lot about the effect that Crisp’s early life might have on his character in After Edward. We keep returning to the feeling of personal invalidity felt by the characters because their way of being goes against the grain of society. As one character says ‘the world is made for white, male heterosexuals’. Before gaining public recognition, Crisp tried to enlist in the army in the early 1940s but was given a medical exemption on grounds of ‘sexual perversion’. It was in this period that Crisp became a life model for artists, something he would continue to do for 30 years. Crisp’s fame came later in his life, following the publication of his book The Naked Civil Servant and its subsequent screen adaptation starring John Hurt. Following this he toured regularly with his show An Evening with Quentin Crisp, where he would perform for the first half before taking audience questions in the second. Crisp also became successful across the Atlantic and eventually he moved to New York. In New York, as in London, Crisp’s name and phone number were listed in the public directory. Crisp saw it as a duty to answer all calls and turn up to all invites, so as long as you paid for it all you had to do was pick up the phone to have him over for dinner. This aspect of his personality was something that fascinated us. Was it because he loved conversation, or did it cover a hole in his personal life? We know from his own admission that he never quite felt loved or cared for. It’s here too that we see distinctions between the character of Quentin Crisp in our play, and the real life figure. Crisp died aged 91 near Manchester as he was preparing for the revival of his one man show An Evening with Quentin Crisp. Throughout his old age he had remained thoroughly outrageous and thought provoking and Richard Cant’s performance marries these elements to a deeply affecting softness that makes Crisp sparkle. After Edward opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 21 March. Photography by Marc Brenner -- source link
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