GYPSY QUEEN, various venues from Fri 18 – Fri 25 May
Tickets: £10/£9/£8. Info: www.gypsyqueentour.com
Liverpool-born, Manchester-based actor and writer Rob Ward’s 2016 play Gypsy Queen tours Wales this month and explores the unconventional love story of a bare-knuckle fighting traveller and a gay professional boxer. Inspiration, says Ward, came about from an initial short play he wrote four years ago, Champion.
“It was around the time Russia was hosting the winter Olympics in Sochi. There was a real conversation in the media and public about some of the laws Putin had brought into Russia – anti-LGBT legislation – so we staged this night called To Russia With Love to raise money for a pro-LGBT charity.
“Champion was about two boxers that fell in love. I’d always liked the idea of that because I think boxing is an innately theatrical sport. You think about how many films have been made about boxing – if you then make that also a gay love story.”
That theatricality allowed for Gypsy Queen to be born, as it was wrought into being around the drama surrounding boxer Tyson Fury’s shortlisting for BBC Sports Personality Of The Year. “This interview was released where he made some really homophobic, misogynistic comments. There was a real furore about it, [with] petitions to have him removed from the shortlist. The BBC’s response was to almost wash their hands of it.
“One of the things I remember Fury saying was that ‘A lot of it is about that rough tradition of how I was brought up and my faith.’ So that then came into the play as well, and it just suddenly went from being a short play about two gay boxers to being a play that still explored sexuality in sport and was a love story between two men, but it then also had this extra world of the traveller community, of faith and sexuality and that feeds into the narrative as well.” A complex play, no doubt, and one that Welsh audiences will be looking to sink their teeth into come the tour this month.
RHONDA LEE REALI