Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Leeds Playhouse & HOME Manchester

IT’S entrance worthy of a megastar. Hedwig (RuPaul’s Drag Race UK contestant Divina De Campo) struts through the audience, whooping up applause, before taking to the stage to sing the Bowie-influenced Tear Me Down; her stars and stripes cape opened to reveal the slogan “gender is a construct.”

It’s not the only thing that’s a construct. In a show that’s described as being a “musical, a cabaret and a stream of consciousness,” it soon transpires that Hedwig is a megastar only in her head. She plays in a scuzzy northern working men’s club while her former mentee Tommy Gnosis, whose hits she co-wrote, performs to a packed Roundhay Park. 

The cult show, written by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, tells how she arrived at this point in a series of sketchy flashbacks. Born in communist East Berlin before moving to Kansas, she presents herself as the missing link between east and west, and an alternative to binary divisions due to a botched gender reassignment operation.

Alternately tart, bitter and needy, she’s as adept at delivering innuendo as she is at performing songs under Alex Beetschen’s musical direction. With a four-octave range she effortlessly powers through the ’70s punk-rock material while backed by her gender-fluid four-piece band, The Angry Inch, and sweetly smiling husband Yitzhak (Elijah Ferreira). 

The musical numbers are accompanied by colourful video designs shown on a bank of old portable televisions and an overhead projector. These help to create a sense of time in Ben Stones’s unfussy set design, for which the stage doubles as a trailer park and dressing room. 

Yet for all its internal glamour it’s in the undressing that Hedwig finally finds power and a sense of self. It’s therefore regrettable that the closing scene feels too throw away to gain emotional heft, leaving the overall production forgettable despite the strong performances throughout.

Showing at HOME, Manchester until May 11, having run at Leeds Playhouse.