QX is delighted to see the return of Vault Festival this year after it was so rudely interrupted by the COVID pandemic. Vault Festival is an independent showcase of live performance and artistic talent, featuring thousands of fabulous performances across theatre, comedy, and live entertainment. Performances are set in bespoke venues across Waterloo, in central London, for eight amazing weeks of creativity, adding colour and vibrance to the otherwise dark winter months.
Vault Festival is one of the most accessible, sustainable, affordable, and welcoming performance festivals in the UK, with many performances having LGBTQIA voices. The festival values art and entertainment equally and creates spaces where artists and audiences feel welcome, surrounded by culture created for and by them.
With literally hundreds of unmissable theatre, comedy and cabaret experiences to enjoy, it’s impossible to pick the best. Seeing even a fraction of the entertainment on offer would be impossible. So to whet your appetite, here are just a few of the events at Vault Festival 2023. We’ve also included a handy link that lists when and where many of the LGBTQI+ events are during Vault Festival 2023.
Varnish
By Jonathan Mayor
It takes star quality to get adopted. And Jonathan Mayor has star quality. Finally, this prince of stage and screen is granting you, his fans, an audience. Varnish is a fabulous, fractured, sparkling, splintered, magnificent, and messy exploration of adoption, addiction, and ego. Jonathan Mayor works across the UK as a stand-up comedian and draws on his life experiences, especially as a transracial adoptee. He appears in/hosts comedy, cabaret and Pride events, including Homotopia, Europride, Queer Up North and more. He was the warm-up for Sarah Millican, and she describes him as “Marvellously wicked”.
Tuesday 31st Jan – Sunday 5th Feb, Multiple Times
Buy tickets to Varnish
Smalltown Boy: The Remix (Work in Progress)
By Harry Wright
Comedian Harry Wright develops their hour Smalltown Boy, which was due to appear at VAULT Festival last year. Since then, this hour inspired by an autistic’s soundtrack to self-discovery and authenticity now includes a few bonus tracks. As a celebration of queerness and not ‘fitting’ in, Harry explores their autism and their sexuality and how it is influenced by growing up in a deprived area of Yorkshire. Harry has never been able to find a good male role model and examines how sex, relationships and music have helped them become a better man, in theory. Plus, numerous dick jokes.
Thursday 2nd February and Friday 24th Feb, 8.15pm
Buy tickets to Smalltown Boy
High Steaks
ELOINA
Two beef steaks hang from her labia as queer, feminist performance artist and clown ELOINA stages a rebellion against labia-shaming and cosmetic Labiaplasty, which is the surgery done to make the labia smaller or more symmetrical. Requests by young people for Labiaplasty on the NHS are rising, and professionals blame this on the lack of visibility of varied vulvas. It’s time to celebrate vulvas and sizzle those steaks!
Tuesday 24th Jan – Friday 27th Jan, Multiple Times
Buy tickets to High Steaks
Mediocre Gay
By David Ian
Too gay? Not gay enough? One-liners and jokes are woven into heart-warming storytelling in this romp through one man’s journey to be the best little boy in the world. Growing up gay in a small town in 90s Kent, it is easy to think your sexuality is why you don’t fit in. But what if it’s not?
Explore the expectations, struggles & disappointment of being a gay man at the same time as being not quite good enough. Witty one-liners & intelligent jokes are woven into heartwarming storytelling in this 60-minute romp through one gay man’s journey to be the best little boy in the world that will make you laugh, think and reflect on your sense of belonging.
Wednesday 25th January, 21:45
Buy tickets to Mediocre Gay
Jason
The Goat Exchange / Marcus Amaglo
Filmed in a single, drunken night at an NYC apartment, Shirley Clarke’s seminal 1967 documentary “Portrait of Jason” is a shifting depiction of an enigmatic subject, Jason Holliday — in his own words, a “hustler” and a “houseboy”, a “stone whore” and a “male bitch”, a “vicious c*nt” and a “sweet, sensitive child”. Clarke and her boyfriend, the actor Carl Lee, feature as Jason’s unseen and seemingly objective interlocutors, but their entanglements with Jason become bitterly apparent as the night progresses.
Clarke’s documentary was a landmark moment in queer cinema and a masterpiece of cinéma vérité, which Ingmar Bergman described as “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life”. JASON is a theatrical interpretation of Portrait of Jason exploring the enduring intrigue of the film: its radical subject, its unreliable creators, and the critical events that led up to, and got left out of, Clarke’s “portrait”.
Tuesday 24th – Sunday 29th January, Multiple Times
Buy tickets to Jason
An Ice Thing to Say
By Vertebra Theatre
In an Icy land of ruins, a human being and a polar bear meet in an encounter of surviving the Anthropocene Era. An Ice Thing to Say blends Ice installation, music, and physical theatre to explore human impact on nature. A multi-sensory experience of inner and outer landscapes, constructs an embodied inquiry into ‘what has gone wrong?’. Vertebra Theatre is an award-winning ensemble of theatre makers and artists from diverse backgrounds who are passionate about creating contemporary work on the principles of devised, physical and visual theatre. The team dives into the absurd and visual storytelling, seeking to explore the dynamics in themes of life and imagination, myth and science.
Fri 27th Jan – Sun 29th Jan, Multiple Times
Buy tickets to An Ice Thing To Say
An Apology to Lady Gaga
By Scram & Scrum Theatre
Boyfriends, at last, after secretly holding torches for each other as teenagers, everything seems to be coming together. It is 2023, and it’s never been easier to be gay and proud, right? Except it’s 2.47 am, Matty has disappeared again, and his boyfriend Tim left to wait and worry. A kaleidoscopic portrait of a relationship divided by “outness”, celebrating the audacious courage of modern queer relationships. Pints vs cocktails. Maroon 5 vs Lady Gaga. Matty and Tim’s teenage years were worlds apart. This sincere and affirming comic-drama digs into the complicated legacy of gay pop culture: the way it shapes contemporary queer life and the possibility of healing in a cultural landscape dominated by queer tragedy—a celebration of living and loving with no holds barred, made by an all-queer company.
Tuesday 14th – Thursday 16th February, 21:25
Buy tickets to An Apology to Lady Gaga
https://www.qxmagazine.com/organiser/vault-festival/ *
*Over the coming weeks, we’ll be adding more events to our Vault Festival listings, so please bookmark our VAULT Festival link to find out when and where you’ll find LGBTQI+ focused events over the festival period.
