After the Act: The inside story of Section 28-inspired musical hitting London this month (EXCLUSIVE)

After the Act is a musical about Section 28, how did that come about?

I remember discovering a few years ago that I had been at school under Section 28, the legislation banning the “promotion” of homosexuality in state schools between 1988 and 2003. We think of it as a relic of the 1980s. But in fact it wasn’t repealed in England until 2003 – my first year of secondary school. As I’ve since learned, although it was then taken off the statute books, in practice it cast a really long shadow over education. Teachers remained afraid to confront LGBTQ+ topics in schools for a very long time. This explained a huge amount about the ways that people of different sexualities or gender identities were talked about – or rather weren’t talked about – at my school. 

When I realised the 20th anniversary of its repeal was coming up in 2023, I suggested to my co-writer Ellice and our musical collaborator Frew that we try and tell the story of the legislation. The anniversary felt like a good opportunity to have a look at how much, or little, has changed in the intervening years. We were really excited by the possibility of using music to access the world of 1980s Britain, and of making it entirely from verbatim transcripts from original interviews and archive material. The investigative research process meant we would speak to a broad range of people impacted – teachers, students and activists – and blend their words together with those from old news clips and parliament debates to tell the story.

After premiering in the New Diorama’s 80-seater studio in 2023, the show has since been expanded and refined with a run in Edinburgh and a tour around the UK, and now the Royal Court where it’s one of the few musicals to play since Rocky Horror opened there in 1973. 

Can you tell us a bit about how you began the creative process? 

We began at various archives in London, looking through news media archives and seeing the headlines from the time that labelled LGBTQ+ people as “looney lezzies” and other derogatory terms. We mined those archives to try to get a real sense of how the debate of LGBTQ+ inclusion in education was being framed, and how queer people were generally being talked about in these public arenas. We were really shocked by the language politicians were using to talk about these communities. 

Then, we did a call out to speak to teachers, students, activists or anyone who wanted to talk to us about their experience of Section 28. We conducted about 30 interviews with people and that felt like such an immense privilege that people wanted to share their stories with us. It felt like for a lot of people this was the first time they’d ever really spoken about it. 

Tell us about collecting the real, verbatim accounts used?

Oddly enough, the very first person that we interviewed for the show was Sir Ian McKellen. He was a really key figure in the fight against Section 28 and the establishment of what became Stonewall. He was so generous with his time. And he shared some fascinating memories with us, including of his own public coming out on a BBC radio debate about Section 28. His enormous personal archive of campaign posters, flyers, meeting minutes and correspondence led us to discover Before the Act. This was a fundraising variety evening he had a hand in putting together before Section 28 passed in 1988. It featured a whole host of brilliant actors performing songs and scenes by queer writers. That gave us our title. It inspired us with the idea of blending songs and scenes – though in a very different way – to tell the less well-known stories of people around the country impacted by the legislation.

What are some of the biggest challenges you faced in creating After the Act?

First of all, there was an enormous formal challenge in setting real recorded speech to music. There’s not that many verbatim musicals around, and there’s a good reason why! We instead immersed ourselves in the musical genres of the time. Many of our songs began by combining a particular monologue or scene with a musical reference. We had a lot of fun clashing together unexpected contrasts. For example, a Billy Bragg-style protest song using the words of right-wing, homophobic campaigners. Or a Bronski Beat-inspired electronic club banger, comprised of horrific tabloid headlines about the AIDS epidemic.

What are the parallels between when the musical is set and today? Has that changed in the last three years since it was first put on in 2022?

For one of our research interviews we spoke to Leigh, the manager of a sexual health clinic in Soho, about his memories of the AIDs crisis. As a nurse on an AIDS ward at the height of the epidemic, he recalled not only the vicious news headlines but the reality of agonising deaths on isolated wards. He saw AIDS, and the media hysteria around it, as a key catalyst for the Tory government’s crackdown on gay rights. But it was his fears of a new fascist wave on the horizon that stayed with me. I heard them most clearly a few weeks ago, when the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that a “woman” is defined by biological sex alone, thereby excluding trans people from all manner of essential spaces and services. The ruling’s impact on trans people’s safety and ability to live their lives, and its emboldening of bigots, has been immediate and inescapable – as well as the sense that it signals the beginning of a wider bureaucratic rollback of rights and protections for LGBTQ+ people. 

Back in 2022, the writing was already on the wall. That year, I remember a series of news items about storytelling events by drag queens for kids being picketed by homophobic demonstrators – and seeing these strikingly paralleled in the archived 80s newspapers we were reading for our research, about Parents Rights Groups protesting the inclusion of LGBTQ+ themes in kids’ books. Both groups characterised queer people as dangerous perverts – at best aiming to turn children gay or trans, at worst outright peados. Three years on, it’s safe to say we are now in that different world. Even in the six months since we last performed the show, LGBTQ+-themed book banning has accelerated under the new US administration and UK councils controlled by Reform have vowed to ban pride flags from their buildings. 

After the Act is a show that tries to remind us not to be complacent. That our hard fought-for rights are not necessarily as safe as we might like to think. That we have to keep vigilant, keep vocally fighting to hold onto them. And to secure those rights for other marginalised groups.

After the Act runs in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs at the Royal Court from Wednesday 21 May to Saturday 14 June.