EDINBURGH FRINGE 26 - Chainsaws, Kylie and the last drag queen standing
Harrison Sweeney's Final Queen sounds like a dare and plays like a love letter, and underneath the fake blood it is making a serious case for queer survival. Outcast World caught up with him at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
There is a particular kind of Edinburgh pitch that arrives sounding less like a show and more like a challenge to your sanity, and Final Queen, which reached the Fringe this month having opened to four stars on its very first preview, is one of the purest examples of the form, being a drag circus horror comedy in which a queer performer sets off across the Australian outback to audition for Kylie Minogue, gets catastrophically lost, and washes up in an abandoned farmhouse where she has to fight her way past chainsaw-wielding bushrangers, assorted ghosts and every slasher villain the genre can throw at her, each one, naturally, staged as a different circus act.
Sweeney is aware of how that lands. When his co-creator Rachel Carey first put the idea to him around a year ago, a drag queen on a road trip meeting a parade of monsters, each one built from a separate circus discipline, his reaction, he tells Outcast World, was simply that it sounded insane and that they should absolutely do it. The rehearsal room that followed was, by his account, exactly as chaotic as that suggests, a matter of throwing wildly different ideas at one another and working out which of them could be persuaded to hold hands.
The division of labour between the two of them explains a great deal about why the show works. Carey is the horror specialist, a film and theatre director whose back catalogue runs to titles such as Alice in Slasherland and shows involving lesbian vampires and country and western singers, while Sweeney came to drag only during lockdown, one of those pandemic coping mechanisms that quietly rewired a life. The pair met at drama school the better part of a decade ago, and Final Queen is essentially what happens when a horror brain and a drag brain are left alone together for long enough.
At the centre of it is Grace Lightning, whom the show bills, accurately, as the love child of the final girl trope, a queer circus performer and a camp Aussie drag queen. She began, Sweeney says, as nothing more strategic than his own drag persona, an expression of gender and performance for its own sake, and was only later fleshed out into a character who could carry a narrative, gathering up everything he might want a drag creation to be, the backup dancer, the aerialist, the larrikin, and then colliding all of it with the resilience of the horror survivor. That final girl figure, the battler who is still standing when the credits roll, turns out to map onto drag queens and queer people with an ease the pair found impossible to ignore.
Which is where a show that could so easily have been all wigs and gore reveals what it is actually about. The tagline asks who the real monsters are, and Sweeney is candid that the question is doing more work than the fake blood. He is careful not to overstate it, describing the piece as camp and silly rather than a lecture, but he is equally clear that there is always a comment buried in queer art and that drag is inherently political, and that dressing a drag queen as the final girl and arming her against the dark says something about what queer people are being asked to survive at a moment when, as he puts it, hard-won progress is meeting a great deal of pushback and the fight is getting harder rather than easier. The show does not resolve any of that, and does not try to, which he considers rather the point of art.
There is a neat historical rhyme underpinning the whole enterprise, too. In researching the slasher film, Sweeney was struck by how the genre was dismissed as a low form in the 1960s and 70s, cinema that merely made you scream, and by how precisely that snobbery has also been aimed at queer performance and at circus, which a century ago sat firmly on the outer edge of respectable society. Three art forms, in other words, that share a history of being told they do not count, brought together here by someone who clearly relishes the symmetry.
The Australian-ness is deliberate and unapologetic, a celebration rather than a send-up, though Sweeney is happy to play with the outsider's cartoon of his home country, the one in which nobody can sit in a cafe without swatting away snakes, and there is a moment involving a spider on Grace's face that reliably detonates the room. What he identifies as the defining quality of Australian drag, as distinct from the Drag Race UK aesthetic British audiences know best, is humour, a cheeky larrikin willingness to laugh at yourself as readily as at anyone else, and Grace has it in abundance.
The practicalities are their own kind of horror story. This is a solo show, twenty-four performances across twenty-six days, and it ends each night with the stage in a state its management team must dearly wish it were not, which means Sweeney's evenings finish not at the artists' bar but at the sink, scrubbing stage blood out of a white dress by hand, a detail that tells you rather a lot about the gap between the glamour of the Fringe and the reality of surviving it. It is his first Edinburgh, and he is refreshingly honest about the parts of the machine that do not come naturally, the foyer networking he has never thrived in, and his decision to place his faith in the work instead and let it introduce him.
Whether Grace makes it out of the outback alive is not something to give away here, though Sweeney does offer, in the show's spirit, one thing she could not possibly survive: meeting Kylie Minogue.
Final Queen runs at Big Belly, Cowgate, at 9.30pm nightly until 30 August, with rest days on the 17th and 24th.
