Red Bucket
digital file Colour Sound 1980 25:11
Summary: A colour videotape of a performance by “Red Bucket”, a theatre group set up by members of Gay Sweatshop. The name of the group is a spoof of the radical socialist theatre group, “Red Ladder.” The performance parodies heterosexual and homosexual values, gesturing towards class and gender tensions within gay male theatre. The play follows a heterosexual couple, Karen and Yuck discover their same sex attraction, as Yuck pursues an affair with Fart. Actors frequently drop character to comment on the political pitfalls of the play. The tape features television writer and producer, Andy Lipman.
Title number: 22992
LSA ID: LSA/30210
Description: The camera throughout the video zooms into actors faces to capture detailed facial expressions, the image is occasionally framed by the audience members. The tape begins with the three actors on stage performing spoof versions of themselves, Andy Lipman, a white blonde man with spectacles, wears a green jacket with activist badges. Meanwhile, a white woman wears jean dungarees and a leather jacket, whilst a white man with a moustache wears a navy raincoat and claims to be “the only heterosexual of the production”, the audience laughs. The stage has a metallic silver backdrop, with the words “Red Bucket” scrawled on the back in red pen, posters are pinned to the backdrop with the centre piece being a poster for a film about a heterosexual marriage, indicating the themes of the play. The audience are introduced to Karen, a woman in a relationship with a man named Yuck and we also meet Fart, a man who wants to pursue a homosexual affair with Yuck. Performers hold up a gold frame to their face to perform individual monologues, actors perform in faux american accents. The scene then changes to an exchange between Karen’s boyfriend and a doctor named Yuck, who is in conversation with Fart, the scene plays on queer double entendres.
Yuck returns home to Karen as she begins to have doubts about their relationship. The scene ends and Fart appears shirtless and flirts with male members of the audience, Karen stops this scene as she thinks this behaviour is offensive to women. The play then transitions to a scene between Yuck and Fart at a public lavatory, they eye each other up and slowly touch each other and sniff poppers. Fart claims he recognises Yuck as “one of the queens down the clinic.” Yuck returns to Karen and she admits to being a lesbian and Yuck admits to being gay, as Yuck begins to express more machismo ambitions, Karen drops character and gives a feminist critique of this motivation. Karen and Yuck split and we move to a scene of Yuck and Fart working out, Yuck starts to rant about how they should be more gentle to each other whilst Fart disregards it as the lofty ambitions of the Gay Liberation Front era. Yuck drops character as the actors begin to argue, Karen enters and proclaims she has written a feminist ending for the play. The two men leave and Karen reads her matriarchal ending, the men storm the scene in drag and they all begin to argue again, Karen complains she is leaving the company to pursue a women's only theatre. The audience claps and the play ends.
Credits: Philip Timmins (Filmmaker)
Cast: Andy Lipman
Locations: London
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