The 'lost' lesbian farce being performed for the first time in almost 40 years

A university student’s discovery of a long-lost lesbian farce has led to a performance of the play set to take place in Salford - for the first time ever.

Whilst studying drama at the University of Manchester last year, theatre writer and director Calima Lunt Gomez was tasked with finding a lost play as part of a module on queer representation. Flicking through archives of years-old books and scripts, Calima stumbled upon an anthology, published in 1987, simply titled Lesbian Plays.

Alongside works by poet Jackie Kay and The Women's Theatre Group, the LGBTQ+ book contained a 1986 play titled The Rug of Identity. Calima said the work, written by Jill Fleming, stayed with her long after completing the module.

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“I was thinking about what I wanted to put on next and it just really spoke to me - it’s a really fun play and it’s all about queer joy,” Calima, originally from Yorkshire but now living in Manchester, tells the M.E.N.

“It’s just a crazy plot - it literally follows a woman trying to find the identity of her father. Her mother has been on death row, and she’s now been executed, so she’s also trying to find the woman who turned her mum in. It’s not as serious as it sounds, it’s a classic comedy of manners, it’s very farcical and just completely camp.”

Only performed for a few nights in London’s Oval House Theatre in 1986, the show received little fanfare bar a review in The Times. Having outlined that the show had to be ‘delayed for 20 minutes to allow a crucial prop (a lavatory pedestal) to be mended’, the reviewer concluded it was ‘one of the most sublimely ludicrous plays I will have ever sat still for’.

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