R.I.P. Bette Bourne
I join the chorus of mourners marking the passing of the great British performer Bette Bourne. Like many New Yorkers, I first encountered Bette as a member of the gay vaudevillean troupe Bloolips, who descended on New York City in 1980 with their show “Lust in Space.” The impact on the downtown theater scene was not unlike that of the Ramones manifesting in London and galvanizing the punk rock scene there. They were the toast of the town for several years. In 2001 I had the pleasure of interviewing Bette for The Advocate on the occasion of his performance as Quentin Crisp in Resident Alien at New York Theater Workshop. I’m reprinting the piece here and recollecting the joy of seeing, hearing, and experiencing this dazzling artist.
Bette Bourne was 16 the first time he laid eyes on Quentin Crisp in front of London’s National Portrait Gallery, a moment he still recalls vividly. “He still had red hair, the hat, the whole silhouette,” says Bourne. “I was horrified. I’d never seen anything so dreadful and frightening.” It was, after all, 1956, when virtually no one in the world dared to play the role of Public Homosexual except for a rare bird like Crisp.
Now it’s Bourne’s turn to step into those famous shoes. In Resident Alien, Tim Fountain’s play now running at Off-Broadway’s New York Theater Workshop after a successful premiere last fall at London’s Bush Theatre, Bourne provides a private audience with the writer and wit who called himself “one of the stately homos of England.” Crisp, who died last year at the age of 90, became an international celebrity with the 1975 film The Naked Civil Servant, based on the 1968 memoir of his life as a prostitute, illustrator, artists’ model, and gay pioneer. He moved to New York City in 1981 after the success of his own show, An Evening with Quentin Crisp, in which he reminisced and dispensed commentary on modern life worthy of Oscar Wilde. “If you do something terrible,” he advised, “go on television and talk about it. People will cross the street to tell you they saw you on TV.”
Anyone familiar with Bourne’s work as reigning diva of the British queer comedy troupe Bloolips will agree that no one is better suited to play Quentin Crisp. A pretty damned stately homo himself, Bourne is a veteran of London repertory theater who first made a splash in New York with Bloolips’ 1980 Lust in Space and won acclaim playing Blanche du Bois in a gender-bent adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire called Belle Reprieve. His charismatic stage presence combines comic grandeur, endearing fragility, and an unmistakeably plummy voice that conjures Shakespeare and Maggie Smith.
Bourne cooked up Resident Alien with playwright Fountain and director Mike Bradwell. “It’s a wonderful play, delicious to speak,” Bourne says. “The difficulty in creating the part is that I knew Quentin very well. I was always in his rooms, and we had great times. The thing is, it’s easy to just do an impersonation. It’s superficial. I’ve got to get inside the feeling of the man. He was 30 years older than me and grew up in the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s terrible scandal. He was followed through the streets by mobs of people pushing him, throwing things, and spitting at him. Telling me about it, he would rap on the table in his fury and say, ‘They don’t know! They don’t know!’
“Imagine!” Bourne continues. “He was out in the 1920s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and the old girl was still primping in the 90s! I think he was the bravest man who ever lived.”
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