Slap TrashTilly McAuley/Gay Times
Already known on the London and Manchester revue scene, The Divine David is the monstrous, megalomaniacal alter ego of the otherwise softly spoken, former shoe shop sales assistant and 34-year-old gay man, David Hoyle.
On stage he looks, as he says himself, like someone who’s gone through a “cosmetics explosion”. The result is pure Edvard Munch meets Baby Jane. One reviewer described him as a “decomposing Liza Minnelli”.
His act, a coruscating rant against the “crass commercialisation” of the gay scene has caught the wind of a growing change of mood among a set of commentators who despair that we have become complacent. Who cares if we don’t have any real equality when we can pop a pill and party, etc.
“What do you think about genocide in Rwanda? Or Women’s rights? Or Bosnia?”, he taunts his audience the slips into a vacuous pretty-boy persona to answer: “On Tuesday I go to the gym and the next day I don’t.” Suddenly crazed, he urges us to “Burn down the gym! Visit a library!”
A laughter born of recognition exploded around the Vauxhall Tavern, where late last year he won a cult following with his show Viva, Viva Apathy.
Now he has his biggest show yet, The Divine David: Untitled… Naturally at London’s Albany Theatre. On stage for “more than an hour, it will be value for money” including all his favourite characters.
But what will become of his splenetic splendour if the big guns come knocking on his dressing room door, chequebooks at the ready?
Will he soften his act? “Oh, I don’; think I could do it if I had to compromise. There have been a few enquiries, from television and the like, but I won’t believe it till it happens.” And if it doesn’t? “I don’t mind. I’ve grown used to poverty, I know how to live on leaves and berries…”