“Too gay for Iraq, too Iraq for gay.” That’s Amrou Al-Kadhi’s predicament, and From Qur’an to Queen recounts their lifelong struggle to resolve the contradiction. That it’s delivered by their drag alter ego, Glamrou – a character who channels (they tell us) their mum – adds another layer of identity confusion. But there’s nothing muddled about the show’s self-presentation: it’s dispatched with the overtly sexy pizzazz you’d expect from the former eminence of drag supergroup Denim, whose rite-of-passage tale is never too traumatic for a bit of side-eye and saucy innuendo.
The governing conceit is that a domineering, disapproving Allah is the ex-boyfriend Glamrou can’t shake off. “Sin followed me everywhere” when they were a child, they say; tonight, their wig curls into devil horns. Glamrou goes to great lengths to escape their religious youth: they move to England and elocute into oblivion their Middle Eastern accent; they throw themselves into queer sex and (at Eton, of all places) self-hating Islamophobia. But still Allah is there in their head, refusing to get the message.
The theatricality of Glamrou’s narrative voice doesn’t always disguise the straightforwardness of this coming-of-age narrative, which now and then feels as if only chronology is propelling it forwards. It’s at its best when it shows as well as tells: for instance, when the soundtrack to another obliterating chemsex party blurs in Glamrou’s head with the sound of the muezzin – Lady Gaga singing “Allahu akbar”. It’s weirdly haunting, in this context at least.
But if Glamrou’s journey to an acceptance of their contradictions, and back into the arms of their divine ex, is over-articulated, it’s also funny and expressive. The register is poised between self-absorption and self-irony. The songs (accompanied by MD Porscha Present) veer between overwrought intimacy and pop pastiche, and tend to run amusingly out of the singer’s control. There’s tart material, too, on Glamrou’s struggle to integrate – disappear, even – into Britishness, in the teeth of our racism and colonial complacency. A queer staged Bildungsroman that’s got swagger to spare.
At Soho theatre, London, until 9 October.
