Performing the Lavender Menace: Negotiating Stereotypes as Lesbian Camp in Berta Freistadt’s A Fine Undertaking

Drawing upon original archival research from the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, this essay proposes an alternative mode of ‘lesbian camp’ in Berta Freistadt’s 1984 play, A Fine Undertaking. Using Notes on Camp (1966) as an initial framework, I suggest that Freistadt builds upon Sontag’s paradigm, expanding it to include a highly politicized, highly self-aware mode of camp. Negotiating both internal and external stereotypes, Freistadt subverts assumptions about “radical” lesbians and their impact on the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain and the USA. In showing their rejection of the patriarchy to be excessive, their “coming outs” unaffected, and their feminist rhetoric merely aesthetic, Freistadt’s lesbian characters embody a sense of frivolous artifice. I suggest that the effect of such is that of reclamation. Freistadt takes the stereotypes imposed upon lesbian communities and exaggerates them, twisting and expanding their definitions until they become nothing more than absurd substitutions for reality.
Utilising Freistadt’s original manuscripts as well as hand-made posters, programmes and other items shoestring theatre paraphernalia, this essay’s archival foundations reflect the very purpose of investigating Freistadt’s largely “unknown” body of work: for a theatre movement so concerned with undoing years of lesbian invisibility, it seems unfitting that so much of Britain’s lesbian theatre history is still, by and large, hidden within the depths of the archive.