The eighties rolled on, and [Goncharov’s] underground cult following became a proxy for queer men to explore the extremes of desire without actually exploring the extremes of desire; the breakdown of the heterosexual marriage, a casual acquaintanceship that turns into bitter resentment, the entanglement of violence and hunger, all drew in an audience of punks, young artists, and counter-culture rebels.
Violence that stands in for queer desire, and queer desire that ends in violence, would become a controversial topic over the next several decades of film and media discussion – as more mainstream LGBT cinema took off in the 90’s and 2000’s, the subject of exploitation and over-exposure of homophobic trauma would become less palatable.
But this was the UK under Thatcher’s reign, and in the early 80’s the nature of homosexual desire was still taboo. This was barely ten years after the first pride, the Thorpe political scandal was still fresh in the minds of the polite society, and homosexuality was a topic reserved for scandalised tabloids.
It’s with this backdrop that underground re-enactments of Goncharov became popular in Brighton and Manchester, spreading eventually to London and the Oxford/Cambridge drama clubs. Amateur thespians played out the death scenes, the first meeting, the confrontations, the shoot-outs, the quiet desire. Male performers would take the roles of Katya and Sofia - in most popular re-enactments, Katya and Andrey would share one actor. Women played the parts of men, men played the parts of the femme fatale, and gender non-conformity abounded in the liminal space between lawlessness and story.
A tragedy knows it’s a tragedy. The actors in the re-enactments took a Tom Stoppard-like approach in how it repeated its narrative violence. The actor that will kiss Goncharov in one scene as Katya, will kill him just ten minutes later as Andrey. No costume change, no make-up trickery – same narrative tools used to hammer out the machinery of desire. Andrey and Gocharov may be doomed by the movie to kill eachother, but in the nimble hands of experimental theatre, they can finally play out their unsated hunger.
Francine Rubek and Samson Jian, Under the Queer Gaze (2014, Palgrave Macmillan)
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