A stellar cast is to appear in BBC Four’s Queers. Ben Whishaw, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Front, Russell Tovey, Gemma Whelan, Ian Gelder, Kadiff Kirwan and Fionn Whitehead will star in eight 15 minute monologues.
Curated and directed by Mark Gatiss, Queers sees eight new and established writers respond to the 50th anniversary of The Sexual Offences Act which partially decriminalised homosexual acts between men. The series will be broadcast as part of the BBC’s Gay Britannia season this summer.
Taking in 1957’s Wolfenden Report, the HIV crisis and the 1967 Sexual Offence Act itself, the monologues will explore some of the most poignant, funny, tragic and riotous moments of British gay history and the very personal rites-of-passage of British gay men through the last one hundred years.
In ‘The Man on the Platform’, Ben Whishaw (London Spy, Spectre) returns from the trenches of the First World War, whilst a hundred years later, Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) reflects on gay marriage in ‘Something Borrowed’.
‘More Anger’ finds Russell Tovey (Him & Her, Being Human) playing a gay actor in the 1980s, and Rebecca Front (War and Peace, Humans) contemplates her very particular marriage in ‘Missing Alice’.
Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones, Decline and Fall), Kadiff Kirwan (Black Mirror, Chewing Gum), Ian Gelder (Snatch, Game of Thrones) and Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk, HIM) appear respectively in ‘A Perfect Gentleman’, ‘Safest Spot in Town’, ‘I Miss the War’ and ‘A Grand Day Out’, each examining the very different attitudes and social changes in gay men’s lives over the century.
The plays are written by Matthew Baldwin, Jon Bradfield, Michael Dennis, Keith Jarrett, and Gareth McLean, who are writing for television for the first time, alongside established screenwriters Jackie Clune, Brian Fillis and Gatiss himself.
The 8×15 mins series was commissioned by Cassian Harrison and Mark Bell, Head of Commissioning, Arts and is made by BBC Studios. The Executive Producer is Pauline Law.
Queers is being produced in partnership with The Old Vic theatre who will stage all eight of the monologues in July, in the run up to the television transmission. Tickets for the live staging are on sale now, with casting to be announced.
