RADICAL REDISCOVERY: HOMOSEXUAL ACTS & BEYOND Exhibition Explores 50 Years of LGBTQ+ Theatre History

London Performance Studios will open Radical Rediscovery: Homosexual Acts & Beyond this November, a landmark exhibition tracing the early years of lesbian and gay theatre in Britain and celebrating the artists who transformed the cultural landscape from the margins outward.

Curated by theatre historian Dr. Susan Croft, the exhibition runs November 7–December 14, 2025 (Thursday–Sunday, 12–5 p.m.) at London Performance Studios, Penarth Street, SE15 1TR, with press and private views on November 6. Admission is free.

Fifty years ago, Homosexual Acts opened at Soho’s Almost Free Theatre — Britain’s first official gay theatre season. Its success was unexpected and explosive. “We were saying, ‘Yeah, we’re gay – so what?’” remembered producer and Gay Sweatshop founder Alan Wakeman, whose company would go on to tour nationally and change the lives of audiences in towns that had never seen gay characters on stage.

Half a century later, Radical Rediscovery: Homosexual Acts & Beyond looks back on that defining moment and the movement it sparked. Through posters, photographs, costumes, set models, props, archival footage, and first-hand interviews, the exhibition brings to life a network of theatre-makers whose work was as political as it was performative.

The exhibition highlights include:

• The street theatre of the Gay Liberation Front, whose activism spilled from protest marches onto pavements and stages across London.

• The touring productions of Gay Sweatshop, which brought queer stories to working-class and rural audiences.

• The radical drag of Bloolips and the lesbian camp of Hard Corps and Parker & Klein, whose humor and defiance challenged every norm of the era.

• The emergence of Black lesbian, gay, and queer theatre in the 1980s, marking a new chapter in representation.

• Reflections on Clause 28, censorship, and the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on artists and communities.

Also featured are lesser-known stories such as Bradford’s The General Will, a collective that shifted from agit-prop activism to a working-class lesbian and gay theatre company, and the Brixton Faeries, born from South London’s queer squats in the 1970s.

Dr. Croft, an Associate Artist at London Performance Studios and founder of Unfinished Histories, has dedicated much of her career to archiving and reviving the legacy of alternative theatre.

“Those early artists had the audacity to stand on stage and say, ‘This is who we are,’” said Croft. “They claimed space in a society that often refused to see them, and their courage built the foundations for queer theatre as we know it today.”

To accompany the exhibition, London Performance Studios will host a two-day symposium (November 7–8) and a series of readings, pop-up talks, and new artist commissions inspired by this rich history. Among the works to be revisited are Maureen Duffy’s Rites (1969), a feminist retelling of The Bacchae set in a women’s lavatory, and the first play by Black gay writer Martin Patrick, staged at Oval House in 1987.

Radical Rediscovery: Homosexual Acts & Beyond builds on the success of London Performance Studios’ 2024 exhibition Radical Rediscovery: Feminist Theatre in Britain 1969–1992. Both are part of Croft’s three-year project Fifty Years of the Fight for Inclusion (FYFFI), revisiting key moments in feminist, LGBTQ+, and racially diverse performance history.

Croft’s accompanying work through Unfinished Histories, co-founded with Jessica Higgs, continues to document the groundbreaking theatre movements of the 1960s–1980s — particularly those driven by women, queer artists, and communities of color.

About London Performance Studios