Dr Luke Lamont (he/him) is a researcher in documentary theatre, and his published work has featured in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (2018) and Fifty Key Irish Plays (Routledge, 2018). Luke has taught at IADT, University of Salford, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Galway, UCD and Griffith College Dublin, and has worked at the Abbey Theatre in both permanent and freelance capacities.

His first monograph, The Documentary Aesthetic in Contemporary Irish Theatre 2010-2020, is forthcoming in 2025 with Liverpool University Press.

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This paper considers the combined use of verbatim and musical performance in two post-Brexit productions: Abomination: A DUP Opera (2019) by Conor Mitchell and After the Act (2023) by Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens. It considers the historic functions of the verbatim and musical theatre forms, and outlines how their combined use signify differing attitudes towards the resurgence of far-right populism in British politics.

Abomination satirises the patterns of homophobic speech within the leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party. After the Act examines the1988 Local Government Act: notorious for section 28, which prohibited materials ‘promoting homosexuality’ (House of Commons Library, 2023). Both librettos are taken verbatim from public statements and, in After the Act, testimonial interviews from citizens affected by section 28. They follow a lineage in verbatim theatre practice by highlighting the effects of institutional homophobia in Western society. However, as Ryan Claycomb warns, in the rightward lurch of Western democracy since the 2010s, the utopian spaces created by verbatim theatre now seem to resemble a ‘liberal fantasy’ (2023: 10)

While both productions present extreme and camp versions of iconic political figures from the British right, ridiculing conservative populism in British politics. Abomination emphasises the performative grandeur of DUP Christian moral discourse, in a similar manner to Alecky Blythe’s London Road (2011). After the Act, however, recreates the emotional resonance of historic anti-LGBTQ+ protests though rousing musical performances. The productions in question emerge in a post-Brexit context: a political movement inspired by “the prospect that Britain could regain some of the greatness they associated with its imperial past” (Kennedy, 2019: 170). This paper addresses potential continuities between the resurgence of British imperial attitudes and contemporary homophobic discourses. David Richards asserts that ‘gay rights [acts] as a resistance movement that […] questions and subverts imperialism both at home and abroad’ (2013: 145). Might the reverse of this assertion – the reinstitution of imperialist sentiment to the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights – also hold true?

Texts Cited:

Claycomb, R. (2023) In the Lurch: Verbatim Theatre and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation. Ann Arbor: UMP.

Kennedy, D. (2019) ‘The Ongoing Imperial History Wars’ in Embers of empire in Brexit Britain by Stuart Ward, and Astrid Rasch (eds). Bloomsbury.

Richards, D. (2013). The Rise of Gay Rights and the Fall of the British Empire: Liberal Resistance and the Bloomsbury Group. Cambridge:CUP.