“Ask yourself this. If there were no praise or blame – who would I be?”

Mark Farrelly’s hugely acclaimed solo play returns to the Jack Studio!

From a conventional upbringing to global notoriety via The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp was one of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century.

Naked Hope depicts the legendary Quentin Crisp at two phases of his extraordinary life. Firstly in the late 1960s in his filthy Chelsea flat (“Don’t lose your nerve: after the first four years the dust won’t get any worse”). Here Quentin surveys a lifetime of degradation and rejection. Repeatedly beaten for being flamboyantly gay as early as the 1930s, ostracised simply for daring to live life on his own terms.

The play then transitions the audience to New York in the 1990s. Here a much older Quentin, finally embraced by society, regales the audience with his sharply-observed, hard-earned philosophy on how to have a lifestyle: “Life will be more difficult if you try to become yourself. But avoiding this difficulty renders life meaningless. So discover who you are. And be it. Like mad!”.

Naked Hope is a glorious, uplifting celebration of the urgent necessity to be yourself.