Oppression of Section 28 recalled in musical play - Chichester dates

But it hasn't been put properly centre stage before and that's what Billy is doing with After the Act, a verbatim musical about Section 28, which he directs and which he co-wrote with Ellice Stevens who also appears in it.

The play is at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester from Wednesday-Saturday, November 27-30.

“When we began this project we realised that there had not really been anything that told the actual story of Section 28 as the main event, the political culture behind it and how it went through parliament and what its impact has been. We were more interested in doing that than a fictionalised story and that's what we set out to do. It’s a verbatim play. We interviewed students and teachers and activists. We did a call-out to a couple years ago but also some people were contacts, people that we knew would have lots to say. It was a self-selecting group of people that had a particular story or a particular desire to speak about it, and a selection of these stories is the emotional through-line of the story, woven through with the national events. But it's also musical. That was really the challenge, a verbatim musical about Section 28. There's no unity of time or space. It's a huge story but really the music is the unifier. The strands are brought together by the music which has a 1980s synth heavy feel.”

In the piece four performers will play about 30 characters, multi-roling to offer a range of ages and different accents.

“I know now about Section 28 because I've read up about it and I think what was behind it really was fear of the other, fear of the unknown. I have a lot more empathy for that, for how parents may have felt when a new equalities doctrine was being pushed on them, with the local authorities saying there were new cultural values that a child could have two mums or two dads. That must have felt scary to them at the time. I absolutely don't share those views but I do have some sympathy for how they must have felt. As I say, it was basically the fear of the unknown at a time when the right wing press narrative was about promiscuous gays spreading HIV. Section 28 wanted to quash that and it was useful for Thatcher to have an enemy, enemies like the miners and the gay people. It was useful for her government to have a scapegoat.”

And that's what the piece looks back on: “There's a very basic desire to educate people about one of the biggest impacts on growing up and on schools that we've had over the years. Whatever your gender identity, it is not healthy to grow up without full knowledge. The fact is that so few people knew about it and it's now being used as a blueprint for what might be happening in some states in America.”