David Roddis was a Canadian, from Toronto, who first came into the Homo Promos orbit in 1987. He was a charmer, a fine nervy comic actor with a rich baritone voice. He played piano and wrote his own plays and songs for cabaret.
He gelled with the company instantly. We cast him as Butch in Dorothy’s Travels for Lewisham in 1988 and were going to feature him in an early version of Desire the next year, with music by Michael Derrick, the then Managing Director of The Pink Singers.
Unfortunately, we were really asking far too much of him - up to eight songs in three months - for a man who was primarily an arranger, not a composer. After much anguish he passed on it but came to Edinburgh as a cabaret pianist for our evening show Just Three of those Things at the Blue Moon Café. This substitute was cobbled together from my repertoire and David’s and went well.
David was a prolific writer who offered us several plays. He had run a company, Rhubarb Theatre, in Toronto and wrote mainly for himself and a few close friends. The best way to describe him is as a Canadian Woody Allen. He traded on his neuroses for his comic persona, and it was very difficult to imagine anyone else doing the characters called ‘David’ in his plays.
We were going to present Hot, Hung and Horny in 1991, but disaster struck. There was a notorious trial, the ‘Spanner Trial’, which defined the limits of consent and put paid to the notion that it was an individual's right to do what they liked with their own body.
It started, as so many of these so-called ‘vice ring’ cases, with a video of two men having consensual S&M sex in Manchester. In a previous generation it would have been a letter. From those, and address books, there was a trawl which resulted in well over 100 men being interviewed, and eventually sixteen being sent to trial at the Old Bailey.
It seems that men had been responding to personal ads in the gay press and as a result an informal group from the fluid membership would meet up in venues all over the country to have S&M sex, film the orgies, and distribute the videos back to the members. Police seized more than 400 such tapes.
The case established the principle that in English law consent does not provide a defence against charges of Actual Bodily Harm. You cannot consent to be given injury unless it is ‘transient or trifling’, but the concept casts a wide net. For example, it includes bruising and abrasions.
The defendants got between twelve months and four and a half years, in a hysterical press atmosphere, inflamed by Greater Manchester Police, which asserted that these videos included ‘snuff’ movies. This was for incidents where nobody had made any complaint, and in which nobody suffered any permanent harm.
There were appeals and protest marches. The Law Commission recommended decriminalisation of S&M activity in all cases, except that which resulted in serious disabling injury. This recommendation has never been adopted, and the European Court of Human Rights endorsed the British Legal establishment view.
I never discussed this with David, so I have no idea of the extent of his involvement. But he dropped everything and fled back to Canada. Perhaps he was worried that his leave to remain in the country could be jeopardised; perhaps he was in some videos and feared being pursued.
All I know is, that as a result of that puritanical and vindictive case, this country lost the talents of a superlative performer and writer, and Homo Promos lost a good friend.
We did stay in touch. He took the script and score of Dorothy’s Travels back with him, and I had the pleasure of going to Toronto to see a wonderful production of that musical, adapted for local references. I believe it was nominated for a DORA, the local theatre awards. He wanted another show, and I wrote the gay version of La Ronde for him. However, the music took an age to complete, and by the time it was ready I’d lost contact with David.
In the meantime, he’d left us with his scripts. Of these, the two-hander Hot Hung and Horny had been performed in Toronto earlier. Here, following our own production of Leather in 1990, the two supporting actors Keith Bursnall and Toby Collins had formed a cabaret act called Bent Double (great name!). Leather had been a very long play, so they had ages in the dressing room to bat around ideas for songs.
They were instantly successful. Toby wrote the music, played the piano and was regarded as rather tasty. Keith was statuesque and soigné and a demon with both lyrics and ad libs. They worked well together.
We decided to put on Hot Hung and Horny as a vehicle for them, and to further their cabaret career as well. The show was done at The Tabard, a pub theatre in Chiswick, in a double bill with the all-woman play, Claire Purkiss’s Flying Lessons. This was June 1991.
The major artistic triumph of the play was Keith’s creation of a Pink Slingback, a baroque cocktail which is described in the play as generating its own microclimate. For this he sought out a little factory in Chalk Farm which made artificial fruit and veg for movies, restaurant displays, and adverts.
Not just the fruit, you understand, but individual lemon and orange slices, kiwi fruit slices, pomegranate pips and celery sticks. It was an authentic cave of wonders, and I hope it is still there.
Theatre indeed takes us into some unexplored places.
Peter Scott-Presland (January 2021)
Read the Script
Principles don’t make good theatre, at least not alone. I applaud Homo Promos commitment to new lesbian and gay writing; I just wish I could celebrate the work with as much enthusiasm. Both pieces address important and potentially emotive issues and are not without humour.
Flying Lessons examines the moral debate about lesbians and motherhood, with a spirited performance from Tracey Vaughan as Kite, a woman battling against conformity and the expectations of society, family and lover. Emotional high points, the lover’s desertion of Kite, her eventual fate in an asylum, are lost in a clichéd, confused, tensionless narrative.
Hot, Hung and Horny, the story of a love affair between a poet and a cynic, gives no fresh insights into the problems of a gay relationship, leading me to the reluctant conclusion that its only raison d’etre is its self-subject matter. Gay is great, but what about theatre?
Audrey Maude, City Limits, September 1991
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Chiswick’s Tabard Theatre has been treating its audiences to a whimsical double bill of gay comedy staged by the Homo Promos theatre company. And I say ‘treating’ because Flying Lessons and Hot, Hung and Horny were on the whole gems of Fringe drama.
Flying Lessons, by Claire Purkiss, looks at Kate [sic] (Tracy Vaughan) a giggling schoolgirl from Hull who has a girlfriend and a fixation with the colour pink.
She effervesces her way through rejection by her ‘artistic’ lover, her mother’s obsession with seeing her into motherhood and a crush on her hockey mistress crashing thighs. That effervescence does begin to get on one’s nerves after a while, but you can’t help loving her.
I felt a little bit worried and a bit indignant that Kate’s lesbianism was held up as THE escape from the washing line with pegged-on disposable nappies to which her mother (Angela T Ness) was physically tied throughout the play. ‘Lesbophobics’ who were expecting dykes with shaved heads and unshaved armpits would have been sorely disappointed.
David is the unlucky-in-love lonely heart who places a notice in the small ads in an effort to seduce the reader with the promise that he is Hot, Hung and Horny, in the David Roddis play of the same name.
The man who answers the ad is the Brompton Road leathers boy [sic] who heartlessly ‘loved’ him after the obligatory two hours of meeting. It’s a star-crossed coupling; David is all poetry and Earls Court Eric all contempt.
There is copious stereotyping going on here, but it magically manages to be authentic too.
Joyce McKimm, Chiswick Times, September 1991
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Homo Promos put on a double bill of gay plays; one for by and with gay men, and the other for lesbians. It was disappointing that there was so little audience cross-over.
Nikole Bamford frantically directed Flying Lessons as a wacky comedy. Kite, a walking neurosis, played with verve by Tracey Vaughan, jets along a course looking for love amongst crashing thighs. She has a crush on a hockey player.
Claire Purkis’ [sic] play is strong on surreal humour and symbolism. Mother (Angela T Ness) is tethered to a washing line throughout. Conformity, sanity and motherhood are the themes explored.
Hot, Hung and Horny sounded sleazy and I was full of misgivings. Well, how could you tell from that title that it would be witty, amusing and stylish? David Roddis, the author, knows that to punish you, the Gods simply give you what you ask for.
David (dazzling Toby Collins), yet another paranoid neurotic, falls in love with Eric and gets him. They are not compatible. David, who wears white socks with sandals, tells his problems to anyone.
Then ‘shimmering on the horizon’ comes strong, silent and very tidy Eric (Keith Bursnall). Everyone else is played by Glen Scott. This marvellous little cast is excellently directed by Eric Presland.
Peter Stenson, The Pink Paper, September 1991