This is a show about a gay man\u2019s fraught relationship with his father. Andreas Constantinou sits in an armchair, naked, silently listening. He has told us that, during the Covid pandemic, his father died and so did his mother five weeks later. He recorded conversations with them and these are played in sometimes repetitive ways, caught between the fuzz of radio tuning.<\/p>\n
You do not get a sense of Constaninou\u2019s mother but his father\u2019s voice is key. He speaks of his \u201cdisappointment\u201d over his son\u2019s sexuality, of wanting him to be a real man and of his dismay when Constantinou, as a child, started to play with dolls.<\/p>\n
The voices pour out of a TV set, radio and gramophone on stage: they serve as the equipment for this medium-like encounter, the words of the dead for ever living in the air and looping inside Constantinou\u2019s head. His recorded voice tells us anecdotally of other gay men he has asked about their difficult relationships with their fathers.<\/p>\n
It is a deeply personal and experimental show, evolving slowly and going nowhere particularly. Constantinou includes recorded exchanges with a therapist, and there does seem to be an intimate, therapeutic element to it.<\/p>\n
But there is beauty and artfulness too: the set is suffused in washes of colour. Giant screens feature a wrestling match between two men that leaves the ring for ocean waves and meadows. They are arresting images, the bodies of the men filmed close up, the aggression in their fight slowly giving way to something more gentle, balletic and erotic.<\/p>\n
There are moments in the father\u2019s homophobia that leave you breathless for this son. The ending speaks of acceptance and feels too tidy, but it does make the point that there is a choice to reject or accept on both sides \u2013 for son as well as father, even posthumously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a show about a gay man\u2019s fraught relationship with his father. Andreas Constantinou sits in an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":322496,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8816],"tags":[748,1102,4884,712,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-322495","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edinburgh","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-edinburgh","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-scotland","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114981851860487640","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}