The first play we performed was titled ‘Mr. Punch’s Nuclear Family’. Based on the Punch and Judy puppet show for children we included a particular political slant to the traditional story. As the title suggests the subject under scrutiny was family life projected in conventional terms as the cornerstone of society and a haven of peace, security and tranquility in an arduous world of work. Brixton Faeries kept the usual murder and mayhem enacted in the famous seaside entertainment but added a number of alliances between Mr. Punch and others to give added weight the Patriarchal institution called ‘the family’. To recapitulate here is a summary of the play.
The narrator announces the musical tragedy of a nuclear family. Enter Mr. Punch. He is identifiably a working class father with ‘typical’ pursuits of watching football on the telly and a game of darts at the pub. With an imperious and truculent manner his patriarchal status allows him the privilege of ogling women but threatening any man that dares to ogle his wife. He demands his breakfast from Mrs. Punch and is met by the cry of “MALE CHAUVINIST PIG” from his wife who then returns to her frozen posture in front of the television.
The action shifts to a confrontation between father and son. His position as Head of Household and chief breadwinner is undermined by a willingness to cadge money from his son but Sonny Punch has already given him his last fiver. The refusal allows Mr. Punch to indulge in a frenzy of embittered, self-pitying ill-temper made worse by witnessing Sonny Punch kissing his boyfriend goodbye. Sonny sings as song of praise for the Railton Road Gay Community Centre where he met him. Mr. Punch’s anger builds up to fever pitch and in one sentence he slanders and disowns his son, blames himself for what has gone wrong, and even manages, incongruously for a white man, to accuse his son of being a ‘batty man’, the Caribbean derived insult for gay. Mr. Punch insists on his right to rule family affairs but is met with derisive sneers. Sonny Punch accuses him of deserting his duties as a father by forcing he and Mrs. Punch to pay for rent and food while he spends his money down at ‘The George’, referring to a public house from which gay people had recently been ejected and barred. Sonny Punch continues to hum a hopeful tune which infuriates Mr. Punch to heights of uncontrollable anger. He slams a chamber pot down on his son’s head. The song is cut short and repeats the assault to ensure success. Sonny Punch drops dead on the floor and the sign ‘BLOOD’ is placed on him. The dye is cast for further atrocities.
The cast of Mr Punch’s Nuclear Family, back row L-R: John Lloyd, David Fuller, Bernie from Australia, Paul Newton, Colm Clifford. Front row: Alastair Kerr, Ian Townson. Stephen Gee was also part of the cast (but not pictured).
With a ‘sick and evil’ expression on his face he enters the ‘kitchen’ and Mrs. Punch comes to life. In his usual gruff, swazzle-voiced manner he makes a feeble excuse for not going to work and curses his fate as his wife refuses to perform her wifely duties of cooking, cleaning and looking after his every need. She is determined to keep what she earns from her office cleaning job and refuses to tip over money to him like a ‘slag’ to a pimp. She insists on her own name. No longer willing to be Mrs. Punch she proclaims her real name of Judy and sings a song of Womens’ freedom. An apoplectic rage consumes Mr. Punch as he realises she has become ‘perverted’ by the plague of Womens’ Lib. Judy Punch’s song is dramatically cut short as he strangles her across the kitchen table with a tea cloth.
Arriving on stage like a capering idiot in a stage farce the policeman does a Keystone cop inspection of the corpsed carnage. Mr. Punch makes a stiffly irritated comment on the rude intrusion and continues to sing: ‘Thank god I’m a straight man, so noble and refined...’ He is delivered a smack on the head from a big stick, accused of entirely destroying his nuclear family and arrested. He is led away muttering ‘Nuclear family...?’ The scene ends with the chorus singing ‘What’s a nuclear family without a pervert.’
The court room scene is one of complicity from the chief protagonists in supporting Mr. Punch in his hour of need. The stock figures of Britannia and John Bull representing the authority of the establishment and a nominal jury supplementing their views and attitudes make Mr. Punch’s acquittal a foregone conclusion but not before the opportunity for much comic relief and clowning. The sobriety of court ritual, etiquette and orderliness, designed to cow the participants through proclaiming the might and majesty of a state institution, is abandoned in favour of announcing the criminal charges like a gutter-press headline. Members of the jury lazily affect indifference by picking their noses during the plea and Britannia, in a Wildean comment, is shocked to learn that the crime happened before breakfast. A time when no Englishman should ever ‘exert’ himself. The policeman's evidence is full of embellishments, mendacity and irrelevant observations and is delivered at such a speed that no-one can keep up with it.
Mr. Punch freely admits to murdering his nuclear family. In a self-deluded speech, delivered with Messianic rhetorical flourishes and accompanied by angelic background humming, his ‘dream’ of raising an ideal son and training an ideal wife, which he likens to raising the best vegetables on his allotment, comes to nothing. Marshalling his natural resources of tenderness he even gives up his job to devote himself full-time to raising the ideal nuclear family as, he is eager to point out, advertised on TV. He admits to failure but it was not his fault. In tearful, pleading tones he tells of the disease that had perverted his young crop. The Gay Centre on Railton Road thrust perversion upon his son and his wife turned out to be a ‘viper’ feeding a his devoted heart because of Womens’ Lib.
There is a mock summing up in which Mr. Punch is held up to be is held up to be both socially responsible and unimpeachably heroic in his efforts to rear a nuclear family - the essence of a normal society. The jury is directed not to fail in their duty to the judges on reaching a verdict which of course is ‘NOT GUILTY’ though the jury feels unable to extend the judgment to mean ‘INNOCENT’. Mr. Punch and the policeman shake hands and he is urged to hold his head high and start all over again with another batch of little Punches.
In the final scene the buffoonery continues as they all improbably retire to ‘The George’ public house for light refreshments. Here the landlady, Mrs. Mold, proclaims her presence:
“My name is Mrs. Mold fiom pub on t’comer. I’ve grone so cold I’ve forgotten how to smile. I managed to keep the GAYS out for good but could only keep the BLACKS out for a while.”
Mrs. Mold tells them a tale of poofs dancing on her bar tops without wearing any knickers and knocking everybody’s beer over. She no longer feels sorry for them and won‘t let them drink there anymore. There is a chorus of ‘Downright disgusting. Castrate them. Electric shocks etc, etc.’
But their celebrations are thwarted by the sudden appearance of ‘gay ghosties’ led by Sonny and Judy Punch returned from the dead. Singing “We’re the gay ghosties, in hell we won’t roasties...’ they dance and swirl around the the drinkers who are hypnotised into frozen silence. They finally envelope the hapless creatures and thus exact revenge upon them for their evil deeds. The chorus line-up and finale allows the narrator to announce a happy ending.
Clearly the whole production was played for laughs. It was the first excursion into drama for the Brixton Faeries and it would be churlish to look for in-depth development of character, plot and dialogue with a convincing ending. This was an amateur production with the aim of taking to a wide audience a snapshot of the workings of gay oppression in a patriarchal system exposing the collusion and corruption within it. Adopting the Punch and Judy form provided the perfect vehicle to convey all of that. It was done in the euphoric manner of ‘let’s all make a play’ with the emphasis on fun rather than a deadly earnest seriousness.
The play was first performed at the South London Community Gay Centre on Railton Road, Brixton. The audience consisted mostly of friends and the odd stranger who had dropped into the centre for something different. A much more important testing of the waters came later when parts of the play were performed at a local fair in the playground of Effra Parade Primary School. Here the usual set up of stalls selling everything from books to bric a brac was graced by the presence of a rather unusual group of people wishing to perform a different kind of street theatre. The objection to the play came not so much from the parents and children who were present but oddly from a person who through the squatter' group based at a local womens’ centre had come to be aware of and supportive of the Gay Community Centre. In Malcolm Greatbank's words:
"Effra school....a family, local community festival and there were all kinds of things to do mainly for children. We had either by invitation or by negotiation found ourselves there to perform street theatre which we had been preparing for some time and it went down very well even though many people......found some difficulty in comprehending (what we tried to do). That unfortunately caused some offence among surprising people who we had every reason to believe were on our side. I am of course referring to the incident about physical attack by M on C.....when she remarked that we really should not be doing this in front of young children. Not just about the street theatre but being ourselves outside that situation. Walking around and holding hands. Camping it up. Exchanging kisses. Sometimes genuine ones, sometimes political ones. I think it came to a head when we painted over the stereotyped male and female figures. C wasn't the only one to object to us doing this or to ask why we were doing this. When we explained why she lost her temper and we explained...can't you see what it is doing. Reinforcing heterosexual stereotypes about men and women. She said 'Don't you think you are going over the top by doing the opposite'. Or words to that effect. She was actually arguing against us being open, overt and proudly gay in public. I suspect it was an excuse because of their being young children around rather than saying I don't like it or I find it embarrassing. Using children and adults to project their own inadequacies. To project them on to kids. The kids were just lapping it up and enjoying it. They had no idea what was going on. It was just a big fun day out to them."