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.