Playing The Loveable ‘Sassy Gay Friend’: The Comical Queerness of Helenus in Emma Rice’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016)
Résumé
In her gender-subversive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016), artistic director Emma Rice experimented with rewriting Shakespearean characters into queer ones. The most spectacular of these changes was her rewriting of Helena into Helenus (Ankur Bahl), a gay man seduced then abandoned by a closeted Demetrius (Ncuti Gatwa) who violently denied his queerness and attempts to forcibly marry Hermia (Anjana Vasan). While Shakespeare’s original text was barely tweaked, Ankur Bahl’s performance turned Helenus into one of the most memorable characters of the production. Witty and empathetic, he conquered the audience’s hearts by alternating between light-hearted camp humour and heart-wrenching emotional vulnerability, standing in sharp contrast to the aggressive masculinity portrayed by other male characters such as Demetrius, Lysander or Oberon, who were all shown abusing their partner physically or verbally. However, because most of the humour of Ankur Bahl’s performance revolved around Helenus’s identity as a gay man, it was sometimes unclear whether the audience was laughing with or at him. This presentation intends to analyse the characterisation of Helenus through the lens of the double-edged use(s) of queer humour in Rice’s production and its potential consequences on audience reception. While her Dream’s is evidently in favour of more inclusivity on stage, and has re-interpreted Shakespeare’s story into a queer narrative with undeniable public and critical success, I argue that its reliance on stereotypes to provoke laughter creates situations that unintentionally frames queerness as an object of ridicule.
This presentation intends to analyse the dual representation of masculinity in Rice’s production and their potential consequences on audience reception through the lens of Helenus’ nonconformist identity and double-edged use(s) of queer humour. While Rice’s Dream turned Shakespeare’s play into a queer narrative with undeniable public and critical success, I argue that its push for alternative, more positive expressions of masculinity through Helenus’ storyline is undermined by the production’s emphasis on male violence, as well as its reliance on masculine stereotypes that might frame Helenus’ queerness as an object of ridicule instead of a counter-model.