"The number of plays concerned with LGBT experiences since I have arrived is truly heartening"Flickr: Guillaume Paumier

The concept of theatre as a ‘gay’ space is nothing new. For a long time, there has been a sense of moral panic about the bohemianism of the theatre industry as a breeding ground for the odd and anti-social. Even now, in LGBT+ movements, theatre of all kinds is seen as one of the integral cultural mediums of the grand queer tradition.

Part of this is likely down to a self-reinforcing attitude: if theatre is seen as a queer-friendly space, then it is only natural that queer people should gravitate towards it. Theatre is also one of the most easily accessible forms of story-telling, not necessarily demanding the high budgets and technical expertise that mediums like film-making can require. Marginalised groups can capitalise on these advantages, bringing their story directly to a waiting audience. However, it is never that simple. Recent articles about racial diversity demonstrate the need for greater awareness of the kind of stories student theatre chooses to tell, and who it includes in them. Is Cambridge theatre doing enough to be the LGBT+ space it is believed to be?

From my own personal experience, Cambridge theatre is, for the most part, a very accepting environment. There have been a couple of choice comments about how I should “pretend to be straight” in order to be a better actor, but these are certainly in the minority, never from a director, and are not indicative of the wider picture. The number of plays concerned with LGBT+ experiences since I have arrived is truly heartening.

Off the top of my head, I can name the recent productions of The Laramie Project and Romeo and Juliet, as well as last year’s Tory Boyz and Her Naked Skin. It suggests good things that I feel like there are more productions that I have left off this list, for fear of offending the people who put in ridiculous amounts of commitment to bring them to stage.

There are gaps in representation here though. The ‘L’ and ‘G’ components, and sometimes even the ‘B’ section, are being covered. But it’s that ‘T’ part that eludes so many people, along with the other letters lurking behind that plus sign, which are pretty much non-existent.

Part of this is likely down to a lack of confidence in directors and producers in making and casting plays about groups they don’t play a part in, and part of it is the lack of scripts made for these issues in the first place. But I promise you: as long as you are respectful and do your research, there is nothing difficult about making a play about transgendered characters, or asexual characters, or intersex characters, or non-binary characters.

It’s always difficult to decide where the responsibility of representation lies in an entirely voluntary system of theatre production, but it is never difficult to think a little harder about what sort of people you want to be seen on stage.

This doesn’t mean that all theatre involving LGBT+ people must concern itself solely with the fact that queer people exist, and a diversity in representation would be beneficial. Pieces of theatre about the specific issues and lives of LGBT+ people are always important and are nothing to be sniffed at, but I think it is okay now to try to move beyond creating queer characters just to be counted. It’s difficult to think of queer plays in theatre where someone doesn’t die. LGBT+ violence is extremely real and extremely frightening and that, in addition to the high suicide rates, should never be forgotten or wiped away for the sake of pretending that equality has been reached. I don’t reject the plays that have come before, like The Laramie Project, that depict tragically common scenarios of violence and cruelty, and I’m glad they’re still being put on. I do want, however, more plays about queer people living happy lives despite these issues, and queer characters who do live in accepting societies that are not our own.

There’s an entirely different article to be written about LGBT+ people and comedy, but to have them appear in sketches or farces without it necessarily leading to gay or trans-panic jokes would be nice. In addition, just because a play was written before the 1970s, this doesn’t mean there isn’t room for reinterpretation, as many Shakespeare productions in the past have shown. LGBT+ people have, of course, existed for a very long time, even if they weren’t written about. John Dryden may not have known about transgendered people, but he also didn’t know germs existed.

Not all queer theatre needs to be about sex, as some either choose or do not want to have sex. Not all queer theatre has to be about white, young, conventionally attractive men. Not all, or rather no, queer theatre can capture the extreme diversity of such a broad component of society, and nor should every play feel forced to add in characters for the sake of characterising the unquantifiable amounts of queer people across time and space. Queer theatre has its roots in telling real and crucial stories about violence and discrimination, but it has potential to do much more.

I don’t mean to stand over theatre as some great liberal guardian of enforced LGBT+ representation, demanding a queer character in every production I see – that is to completely miss the point. Besides, there is nothing immoral about writing about straight, cisgendered people, mythical as they may be to me. Nor do I mean to refute that theatre is more progressive than many other forms of media, although student theatre is one of the few things I feel like I can affect with an article and without a parade. Cambridge already does so much to promote queer people in theatre, but I don’t feel like it is too much to ask for more when many other places refuse to even consider the notion.

Even if every play in Cambridge for an entire year only wrote exclusively about queer people, I would probably still ask for more, because any sort of queerness in theatre has been sanitised and hidden away for so long. The length of some of these paragraphs is proof enough that we have only scratched the surface when it comes to displaying the history of a demographic that has been censored and erased for hundreds of years. There are other groups who are represented even less, from non-white racial groups to disabled people, but their concerns and demands for representation are not mutually exclusive to LGBT+ people.

It is difficult to express quite how much representation matters to those who have grown up with their sexuality and gender identity validated as acceptable and normal by the media, but Cambridge theatre should fully embrace its reputation as a queer-friendly space. The more of those there are, the better.