Rosemary Branch

Mark Bunyan

One of London's best kept musical as well as comedy cabaret secrets, Mark Bunyan is now celebrating a quarter of a century of performing his own brand of cosily camp songs and sketches.

He has never truly broken out of the gay cabaret niche where he began, though he seems to have attracted admiring notices -- and even written his own newspaper column -- in Scandinavia.   As he puts it himself in his programme biography, "You find him a stool and he'll fall between it."   In 1995, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence -- those self-anointed drag nuns -- canonised him as "St Mark of the Musical Tendency" for his services to gay liberation.

But the wider recognition he actually deserves has largely eluded him.  Duly sainted but not exactly saintly, he now comes across as a rather devilish, plump cherub.   Topped off by spiky blonde hair, his outfit alone is a riotous clash of bow tie and dress shirt formality and camp socks.

His material is likewise eclectic.   Mostly in a satirical comic vein, the occasional venture into darker, emotional territory is pleasantly surprising.   But the targets -- and tributes -- are always familiar, from Saturday shopping expeditions to IKEA to Noel Coward.

The longest section -- a wildly fanciful pastiche on Sondheim musicals as a local amateur company would do them -- proves him to be notably well schooled in the subject.   Now that Bunyan is a member of the Mercury Workshop, I'd love to see him creating an original musical again, not merely satirising those of others so astutely.

MARK SHENTON

THE STAGE.

April 25^th 2002

Click here to return to the rest of Mark's brilliant career.