Bridport Arts Centre
A flamboyant, fast-paced comedy remake of the classic French farce, La Cage aux Folles, where chaos, love, and identity collide as a family pulls out all the stops to keep up appearances
Remakes don’t get much better than Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage, which embraced drag shows long before they became the height of cool, and more unsettlingly, another casualty of the rising tide of fascism. The movie’s entire pivot point is the marriage in everything but name between Armand (the much-missed Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane), the former of whom is the owner of the drag club where the latter is star performer Starina. Their relationship is tested when their son Val (Dan Futterman) announces his marriage to Barbara (Calista Flockhart, in one of her first roles), the daughter of a Republican politician, and Armand and Albert attempt to pass as respectable straights. The result is a satire so subversive that audiences willingly laughed at many of their most sacred cows, including marriage, politics, sexism, homophobia, and the traditional family itself.
USA 1998. Director Mike Nichols. With Nathan Lane, Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest. 119 mins, 15
Thursday 25 June at 7.30pm
Ticket Prices: £6.00-£8.00
Tickets available from Bridport Tourist Information Centre, Bridport Town Hall, South Street DT6 3LF. Tel: 01308 424901 or www.bridport-arts.com
