Amy CorringhamFollowing its sell-out debut at HOME, Manchester in 2023, actor, writer and HIV activist Nathaniel J Hall is taking his critically acclaimed second play, Toxic on tour, arriving at Lowry, Salford on April 16. He talks to Amy Corringham about the shame of same sex domestic abuse, resilience, and the therapy of autobiographical writing.
Can you tell us about your new show, ‘Toxic’?
Nathaniel: “It is a semi autobiographical show about two queer people in their early 30s who meet and fall in love and the polite version is they mess it up but the non-polite version is they f**k it up.
“After my ‘First Time’ show I had come out about my HIV experience quite spectacularly and I had such a great response with standing ovations. However, my personal life was not….my career life was on a high and my personal life was the complete opposite.
“I was stuck at the end of a very toxic and at the time abusive relationship and after I left that relationship I wanted to delve more into that setback and the fact it was all a lie. The ‘First Time’ was all true but obviously when you write a story you crash when it ends. But that wasn’t the end of that story, so I wanted to delve back into it and explore what had happened in my own life. I started to speak to other people and do creative workshops with other queer people and I soon found out that there were common themes and most of us had found that we were carrying extra trauma from things that had happened in our lives which was showing up in our relationships.
“As queer people we have to deal with transphobia, homophobia, queerphobia and racism in the community as well as in the country there’s misogyny and HIV stigma and extra things that are thrown in there. We watch them fall in love within all of these issues within society and see the red flags that they don’t see and they find a very powerful trauma bond. It is a very hopeful show and relatable if you have been in a toxic relationship before. The show ultimately is about queer resilience and showing that there is hope and that you cannot only survive these things, you can thrive from these things”.
What can the audience expect from this show compared to your last?
Nathaniel: “It is set in the underground Manchester queer rave scene. The minute you are in the space you are confronted by the beautiful set, lighting and visuals with original music by a local musician called Shar (Charlotte Barber), which mixes a lot of Britney Spears songs, as we can’t ignore the title ‘Toxic’ without Mrs Spears being thrown in there.
“It is a more serious play and messier play than the first one and it dares to sit in the messiness and complexity of life. It doesn’t necessarily give suggestions on how to deal with life and no answers.
“I wanted to capture the queer community as magic. They are the wittiest and kindest, most compassionate people in the world. It is because we overcome so much and that resilience is there, we have to go out into the world and say we are proud, right? We have Pride celebrations because we have to actively fight the shame that is put upon us but behind that glittery curtain of Pride I know that many people in our community still hide with all that crippling shame.
“Hopefully it’s for anyone who has felt shame in their lives or who has had these things that have impacted their personal relationships and make them feel seen and validated by that, because it is really important for us to acknowledge that LGBTQ life isn’t always Pride parades and that there are challenges that we do face”.
How do you feel about using your own experiences in your work?
Nathaniel: “I use my personal stories in this play. ‘First Time’ was easier to write as an autobiography as it was almost 15 years in the past. But with this show it was very much more recent and I was very clear from the start that this isn’t a revenge art piece against any of my ex partners or about saying they were bad people.
“One in 4 gay men will experience domestic abuse in their lifetimes above the age of 16, which is almost as high as hetrosexual women, but it isn’t something we talk about as there is a real stigma and shame attached to it. When I found myself in this abusive situation I found it difficult to label the abuse as I felt partially responsible. The longer I was in that situation the longer I felt I was potentially behaving in ways that I thought wasn’t an expectation of myself and also abusive.
“It states at the start and end that all of what happens in the show has happened to someone although it’s not all my story. All of the elements are true and have happened to someone and come from other people’s life.
“Writing and performing for my trauma is part of my therapy to share my experiences. Some people do it in private but I do it on stage. So I think it is really important to not just recreate a list of awful things that have happened to me on stage as it isn’t healthy to relive that. I wanted to use this play to show how we are going to work through that and share a message for others through the work that we make”.
What is the goal for the audience?
Nathaniel: “I really want people to come out of the show and have real compassion for themselves and to really look at some of the things that have happened in their own lives with compassion.
“In the modern Pride movement and more generally in the world there is a space with forced positivity and it’s unhealthy. I think it’s really important to have spaces to grieve, to get angry, to be rageful, to sort of pick things apart and rebuild ourselves. Hopefully people feel moved and feel less isolated if in particular they’ve experienced anything that they see in the show. The show deals with a lot of layers of different complicated themes such as HIV stigma around the time PREP came out – 2017 – when this couple met. We’re still living with that trauma and the magic.”
Why do you think it is important for your show to be performed now?
Nathaniel: “Drugs are present in the show and casual sex ,although it’s not a play necessarily about chem sex, which is a sort of slightly different issue within our community. I think what people don’t realise is that actually, you know, often we mask a lot of pain which some people don’t escape from as well. I mean you know, we’ve just seen that The Vivienne‘s family has come out and said that it was an overdose of ketamine. In London, three men die a month from overdoses at parties and those are the ones we know of.
“I think one of the things as a community we are always a little bit fearfull of doing is showing the bad things, because it gives the homophobes and the haters fuel to the fire. We try to cover it and suggest everything is fine and we’re all great, but that’s doing a disservice. So, that’s why I want to bring this up again, as it is important we don’t forget the shame this community has been through”.
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