During February-March 2008, “Tough Times, Nice Times” was playing at London’s Barbican. It was a thought-provoking theatre piece about two naked gay Germans, Martin and Stefan, in a tub, which stood in for a Thai gay sauna. Martin was a former rent boy turned lawyer turned drug dealier, and Stefan was a drug dealer, and their conversation ranged from the Holocaust (as television programme), to HIV/AIDS and absent friends, party drugs, drag queens, sex work and Berlin life.

And yet, Martin and Stefan don’t really ’share’ this ‘conversation,’ given that it is a mediated commercial transaction for money, not an intimate relationship or friendship. Once Stefan has recorded this chat, it will probably be edited and modulated for clarity at his media outlet.

So, I really have to do one of my periodic spiels about the lack of gay performance in this neck of the woods. Why are we missing out continually on Euro-American performance work of merit? It’s bad enough that OutTakes is on hiatus this year, but can’t some independent performance group acquire funding and produce this here? Or better yet, can’t we have our own domestically produced dramas about our own LGBT lives in this country?

Will someone please (a) bring this excellent production to New Zealand (b) write something similar for our own geopolitical context?