Baklâ ★★★★★

Every now and then a show comes along that is so different, so uncategorisable, that it’s a marketing nightmare. Reading the intro above, you might think Baklâ would be dry as dust. You would be wrong. On social media, performer Max Percy has suggested it is “a wild and sexy time”. And it is, but that’s certainly not the whole story.

Max Percy is very much a storyteller but not in a traditional sense. He will deftly deploy dialogue, physical theatre, comedy, video footage and dance to build up a mosaic of meaning. From the off, he is a smiley, welcoming presence. Addressing the audience directly, his chats slip from the conversational into the poetic so imperceptibly, you rarely notice the change until it has happened.

From the title “Baklâ” (the Tagalog word for “homosexual”, or actually more pejoratively, “faggot”) and from the relatively unassuming start, you are lulled into the notion that this is going to be a story about growing up Queer in the Philippines and then later in the United States and his family’s reaction to his sexuality.

But, in this new one-person show, the award-winning theatre maker takes something of a kaleidoscopic approach. One minute you are watching a contemporary moment from his life and with a tiny adjustment, the scene has refocused into a historical vignette. So we elide from Max talking about losing his virginity in 2010 to a physical representation of a pained, dragging movement and suddenly its 1521 and “a galleon ploughs into virgin sands”, marking the moment that Magellan and his crew first came into contact with inhabitants of the Homonhon Island. The sexual undercurrent of the language describing both events begins to create a parallel between the personal and the historical.

One of the myriad of skills that Max Percy deploys to weave such a shifting narrative is taking a seemingly innocuous object and transforming it by the various lenses he applies to it. A bamboo cane is revealed first as a symbol of an indigenous creation myth – that the cane was split by a powerful bird, and the man and woman who emerged became progenitors of the Filipino people. In turn, it becomes a Catholic weapon to inflict punishment on school children before morphing into a tool being deployed for sexual gratification at a BDSM party in London. A papaya follows a similarly unexpected transformative journey.

The scale of Baklâ‘s ambition is breathtaking and it is nothing short of a triumph that Max Percy draws all these diverse elements together to make a devastating whole. Sometimes the message is direct as we are asked to consider the regular occurrence of a Filipino man being mistaken in a Soho restaurant as a waiter, or in a Knightsbridge hotel as a sex worker. At other times, what seems amusing on first glance, such as vintage Filippino TV adverts, progressively take on a darker interpretation.

Following such a variety of scenes and vignettes gradually building up a picture, in the core of the show, there is a grim and dark personal revelation that detonates powerfully. It isn’t simply evocative and upsetting in relation to the personal circumstances. Because Max has so methodically tied the personal with the historical, suddenly your understanding of the 300 years of Spanish colonisation of the Philippines stops being something theoretical and it hits you like a sucker punch.

Max Percy is indisputably a bold, inventive and deeply-intelligent theatre creator with a unique perspective that deserves your attention.

Exploring huge topics such as sexuality, religion, history in a way that is emotionally engaging, warm spirited and thought provoking, Baklâ will leave your brain spinning and your heart pumping. When you exit a show and you have to process your emotions and your understanding, that surely is what the very best theatre is all about?