Valerie Mason-John: the Queen is indeed amus(ing)

We all know that the British tabloids can be a treasure trove of Royal secrets, but the Vancouver Fringe Festival? It will if Valerie Mason-John has her way as she brings her show Brown Girl in the Ring to Vancouver in September.

An expat Brit now living in Edmonton, queer playwright and performer Valerie Mason-John has a simple yet perhaps controversial question to ask: what if black people are biologically connected to the European royals?

“Brown Girl in the Ring is based on the fact that the great, great-grandmother of Elizabeth II was half African and half German,” explained Mason-John. “In royal portraits her African features were frequently softened, obliterated, or even passed off as imagined by the artist. As a result, few people are aware of the African blood in the British Royal Family.”

And while we admit that we were a little dubious of her claim at first, it only took a few minutes of research to discover she just might be onto something.

Literally a play on words, the title Brown Girl in the Ring comes from Mason-John having grown up in a white society where each time she and the only other black child in the town would visit a nightclub they would invariably hear the Boney M song.

Interestingly it is last year’s quintessentially queer Fringe show, Nggrfg from Vancouver’s Berend McKenzie which also explored growing up black in a white society, which gave Mason-John what she called the “kick up the arse” necessary to resurrect the show.

“I too was brought up in a white context,” said Mason-John. “I grew up in orphanages, with white caregivers and was fostered by a white mother. In fact you could say that part of my show draws on this experience. I look at the issues from a different perspective”.

But Mason-John goes a step beyond a simple history lesson on the royal lineage, taking on the persona of “Regina II”, complete with the audacious claim to being the true Queen of England. As part of this guise, Mason-John even goes as far as doing a royal “walkabout”, which she did with some interesting results in Edmonton earlier this year and plans on doing again on Granville Island during the Vancouver Fringe.

“The hardest part [of the royal walkabout] is convincing people I am the Queen,” said Mason-John. “So many want to pass me off as barking mad!”.

Always a fine line between genius and insanity, no doubt Fringe audiences will be watching to see which side of the line this Buddhist-queer-dyke lands on.

Brown Girl in the Ring
Havana Theatre, 1212 Commercial Drive, Vancouver

Friday, Sept 10, 6:30pm
Saturday, Sept 11, 7:45pm
Sunday, Sept 12, 5:45pm
Monday, Sept 13, 9:00pm
Tuesday, Sept 14, 7:15pm
Friday, Sept 17, 6:30pm
Saturday, Sept 18, 4:00pm

Queer artist Valerie Mason-John brings her one-woman show, Brown Girl in the Ring, to the Havana as part of the Festival's BYOV series. Editor of Talking Black: Lesbians of African and Asian Descent Speak Out, Mason-John wrote and stars in this show that asks the question, “What if black people are biologically connected to the European royals?” Queenie claims to be the Queen of England and reveals what the royal family has kept secret: African blood ties and homosexuality.

Visit http://www.vancouverfringe.com or http://valeriemason-john.com for more information.