The man-diva

Reuben Kaye—Living with COVID19 ...and Myself

In early 2020, as COVID19 covered the earth, Kaye found himself stranded in Australia. COVID lockdowns disconnected him from his creative base in London. As with thousands of other performers, there was no Edinburgh Fringe for Kaye in 2020. He did however participate in its somewhat virtual incarnation. Through the cracks of his incarceration, he beamed out his COVID diary clip for a live-streamed Fringe variety show.

Over the show's disconnected offerings, Reuben Kaye shone as its teeth-sparkling beacon. There he was seemingly trapped in a cupboard in Melbourne— the only Australasian city to endure a European-scale viral breakdown. He could have been broadcasting live from one of the city's porous quarantine hotels; suspected for a certain amount of hanky panky. Kaye claimed he was at home, squatting. And with no security guards hitting on him, he probably was.

In a wickedly barbed monologue, Kaye shows great equanimity in his cruelled circumstances. More poignantly, Kaye’s perfectly poised patter now serves as a priceless real-time record of a bizarre time that will eventually fade into history. When caught amid such incomprehensible events, it's hard to imagine they will pass. Because of COVID, the sudden discontinuity arising from the incomprehensible collapse of certainty is better fathomed through Kaye’s acute comedic commentary. In grim times, you can die; or just die laughing. Reuben Kaye is your sardonic guide, helping weigh the options

Kaye’s COVID19 lockdown monologue was but a sampler of him in the full plumage of live performance. He expands beyond a singular identity, animating and affirming what for many, is both emboldening and edgy. With a commanding blink of an exaggerated eyelash, he fastens his audiences in for one hell of a bumpy ride. It's as exhilaratingly dangerous, as it is fun.

At six foot four (in heels) with the wingspan of an albatross, Kaye fills his stage with consummate ease and grace, sometimes recalling David Bowie's Thin White Duke. His broad, athletically lithe frame tucks neatly into a trim waist; off which he drapes a pair of blousy black trousers. Throughout, his rotating costumed accoutrements are always gorgeous. Yet Kaye, with little recourse to frocks, challenges one of the foundations of drag. In a genre of excess, he expresses so much more with less. His transformation is through extravagant makeup. What does drag do to Kaye? "Once I’m in drag [I] feel so much more grounded and so much more powerful.”

Kaye luxuriates in anarchic, cabaret-style interactions with his audiences, ensuring an unpredictably that would be unthinkable in a West End show. The expectations of the genre serve to amplify Kaye’s dramatic range. Dropping into Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, Kaye demurely declaims, “There is a lot of artistic overexaggerated feeling in cabaret, and I wouldn’t want to stray from that... “

Kaye, as the all-seeing ringmaster, arrives as the refreshed MC from the touchstone 20th-century musical Cabaret. From its inception in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels of the 30s, the piece has continued to evolve. As Cabaret, it arrived on Broadway in 1966 with Joel Grey in the "ground-breaking" and “brave” role of the MC. His performance was honoured with the rare theatrical "Grand Slam" of a Tony, an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. Yet, as brave as it was then, his was a pre-Stonewall characterisation. The birth of modern gay consciousness in 1969 is only two generations ago, but it may as well be a millennium. Grey's character can today be read as hiding behind a clown’s white face. He certainly played the role with all the impish naughtiness of a sexual juvenile. But that was then.

Toward the end of the century, Alan Cummings (and artistic director of the 2021 Cabaret Festival in Adelaide) revived the role on both sides of the Atlantic. His MC was a sexually-confident, slyly striding bully boy. With braces, bare chest and black boots, he prowled with pansexual menace. Cumming's MC was a seeker of elicit, excitable and dangerous sex.

And again, times move on. Marriage equality has dawned, dragging a majority of suburbia along for the ride. Suburbia's broad acceptance has rendered unremarkable much of what once seemed so threatening. Today, Kaye is the fully evolved ringmaster; unmasked and unfazed by the allures of suppressed fetishisations. He is the unapologetic, unafraid man-diva revelling in the new freedoms and possibilities of the age. “I will be your host...”

Who has fed Kaye’s man-diva persona? “Liza Minelli," he exclaims, "straight away”. The powerful, brittle brilliance of early Minelli expands naturally into Kaye's very being— along with crackling shades of her mother, Judy Garland. For distraction, Kaye loves nothing better than watching, “Liza Minelli on her midnight show in New York [when she’s] crapped out of her head, but... performing at 150%.”

Since before Kaye was a zygote, Bette Middle has been seducing him with her saucy salaciousness and quick-fire repartee. He admires how her patter transforms a complicit collective of adoring, knowing fans, into a full-blown conspiracy. He loves also, the rubber-faced quick quips of Jim Carrey

Along the way, Kaye channels a post-modern Dame Edna; that monster from respectability. Kaye mercilessly skewers hapless audience members. Just like Edna, it is always in the nicest possible way. Must be a Melbourne thing.

The maturation in recent times of several interrelated social forces—on the move for over fifty years—provides ample space for Kaye's triumphant, expansive persona. To directly access the self-constructions of gay mens' lives in the late sixties, look no further than the then breakthrough piece, TheBoys in the Band. A play and a movie, it was recently revived on Broadway, before becoming a Netflix film. Uneasy as it may seem now, it was at the time, a sympathetic rendition of a milieu that expended extraordinary amounts of energy on self-loathing and destructive cycles of behaviours. Then, in liberal New York, that was as liberal as it got. At least, such milieus were at last, visible to the broader culture. But Stonewall (1969) quickly dated The Boys in the Band. An awakened generation had little interest in seeing themselves as vicious, self-haters; even as it continued.

While the world has changed, many will recognise the travails Reuben himself, endured in his youth. As an unconcealable “girly-boy” (his words), Kaye had to survive the sly whispers and homophobic sledges of the school-yard-bullies. It was, however, an experience that fired his mission. By embracing fully his own inescapably flamboyant persona, Kaye subverted and reframed their vicious slings and arrows. He recalls how the class bully—and maybe not unusually, the object of his adolescent hopes—orchestrated a gauntlet of boys to chant as he passed by, the unoriginal refrain of “poofter, poofter, poofter”. Young Kaye's response was to lavish them with extravagant praise for making such a coordinated effort... just for him.

Later he was bashed by the same-said object of his desire, winding up in a hospital with two black-eyes. Kaye does admit that physically connecting through violence, filled him with the glancing frisson of brief sexualised union. But Kaye needed something more sustaining. Through the two black-eyes, he discovered concealer. And before he knew it, he had plunged headfirst into the expressive possibilities of full make-up. Reuben Kaye was reborn. Today, no modern-day schoolyard bully would think of taking on such a physically confident persona. With only his wit, talent and style to declare, Reuben achieves what Oscar Wylde never could. His patch, his terms, his time.