A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Watched this on YouTube as part of my Albert Finney binge. Finney plays Alfie Byrne, bus-conductor and enthusiastic fan of Oscar Wilde, who is determined to stage Salome with a cast mainly assembled from the regulars in his route. When he casts pretty new passenger Adele (Tara Fitzgerald) as princess Salome, everyone assumes he’s got a crush on her; but it’s his driver Robbie he’s pining for (quite understandably— Robbie’s played by Rufus Sewell). Also, it’s 1963.

The actors all have the usual problem in a movie about amateur theatre, which is figuring out just how well or how badly their characters should deliver their lines in the scenes where they’re rehearsing. I did end up thinking that this church-hall production of Salome has some awfully good sets, given what they have to work with—but I’ve seen that happen in real life. There’s a gag midway through about the shop sending them the wrong costumes, but later we see the wardrobe mistress working at a sewing machine and I think we saw her running about earlier with a sequinned gown. Maybe we’re meant to assume hiring costumes was a stop-gap measure that didn’t work out.

The movie’s own wardrobe people did pretty well on the early-‘60s costumes—I think a few of the hairstyles were softened from what you see in photos of the time, but that usually happens. The extras in what you eventually realize is the local gay bar, where Alfie tries lurking nervously and later tries cruising with disastrous results, wear pretty standard menswear for the era and signal subtly. When Alfie swans in cosplaying Wilde, it does not go well. Our protagonist is almost more asexual/homoromantic than anything else, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is innate, and how much is the result of nothing all these years but his collection of Wilde to advise him. None of the other characters seem to suspect his homosexuality until the third act, but all of them comment on his naïveté.

”He’s a great sinner.”
”He’s a terrible director, but I’m stayin’.”

Curious as to how it would hit if you weren’t familiar with the life and works of Oscar Wilde, because some of the allusions were spelt out but some (Alfie referring to Robbie as “Bosie”, looking up at the stars after getting mugged, his defiant speech to the bus inspector that’s taken straight from the transcript of one of Wilde’s trials) weren’t. Not complaining, I think they work better if the script doesn’t hit you over the head (with this, anyway—the villains are not exactly written subtly, though they’re played with flair, especially by Michael Gambon).