Playwright Chris Goode

An abuser hiding in plain sight

There was shock when a feted theatre director turned out to be a paedophile who collected child rape porn, but were the clues there all along?

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This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.


In June 2021, a 48-year-old man hanged himself in London. He called himself an “anti-capitalist queer”, and he was a playwright and theatre director celebrated as a genius by his queer, anti-capitalist comrades and the theatres who liked a bit of queer anti-capitalism to spice up their programmes. He was “British theatre’s greatest maverick talent”, according to the Guardian.

His name was Chris Goode and his company, Chris Goode and Co, had an idealistic approach to making theatre: “We tell stories that are both accessible and inclusive. And we think out loud about who we are, hoping to catch a glimpse of how we might live better together … we create bold original work that represents queer, dissident, and politically nonconformist perspectives.”

Unfortunately, under all that inclusion, queerness and anti-capitalism, it turns out that Chris Goode was a serial abuser of young male actors in his companies, and a paedophile who had collected child rape porn for at least 20 years. When the truth came out, he was arrested, bailed, and he ended his life a few days later. There was very little response to his death. The theatres who lionised him, and the cultural bigwigs on his company’s board of advisors, all lost their tongues. The situation was especially awkward because Goode’s writing had pointed towards his interest in young children for some time.

In King Pelican (Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 2009) Goode depicts the transgressive, intimate friendship between a young delivery boy and the lonely, gay Edward Lear. At one point, the boy strips naked, takes Lear’s hand and places it on his stomach. Rufus, one of the characters in Men In The Cities (Royal Court Theatre, 2014) is a ten-year-old boy who watches hardcore gay porn. With hindsight, the truth seems obvious. Chris Goode was, as they say, “hiding in plain sight”. After his death, Bloomsbury books quietly vanished his work from its catalogue.

Ponyboy

In 2014 Goode founded an all-young-male physical theatre troupe — “a naked anti-capitalist performance art boy band” according to its producer — and named it “Ponyboy Curtis” after the baby-faced C. Thomas Howell character in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders. Ponyboy’s shows were briefly a cult phenomenon in London’s experimental scene, in part because of their astonishing (unsimulated) sexual explicitness.

A couple of years after Ponyboy debuted, a sense of unease around Goode was palpable in the theatre world. Rumours and accusations about abusive behaviour began to circulate. In 2018, the Stage reported that Goode had commissioned an independent report into “safeguarding failures” connected to the Ponyboy company.

The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester had commissioned Goode to adapt Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee for the stage and announced that he would become one of the theatre’s Associate Artists. Jubilee opened as planned, after what was rumoured to be a troubled rehearsal process, but the appointment was quietly dropped. The day after his death was announced, Goode’s producer tweeted, referring to “the dozens who were victims of his many shades of abuse over the years”.

Maddy Costa, a former theatre critic at the Guardian, spent several years as Chris Goode and Co’s in-house critical writer, witnessing rehearsals and performances and writing commentary on the work. She left the company in 2018. After his arrest, Costa reflected on her work with CG&Co in her blog, in the hope that she might “go some way towards deconstructing the romantic picture of Chris I had previously maintained, help to clear some of the murk that surrounds Chris’s life and death, and counteract the obfuscations of a man who compulsively lied and misled people”.

Costa describes herself as being deployed as his “echo” because she had been “so enraptured by his work that I repeated the political ideas I wanted to believe in, without sufficiently questioning the gap between intellect and action”. She acknowledges that she repeatedly found herself persuading people who disliked the sexually explicit work “to see it in softer ways”. Crucially, Costa admits that Goode used “radical queer politics” — queer theory — to disguise his abuse.

Queer theory is a body of academic writing, inaugurated in the early 1990s, which challenges the stability and validity of conventional boundaries and categories. There’s not much more to it than that, though many of its practitioners use needlessly impenetrable language as they go about their deconstructions. There is some interesting queer scholarship, but the discipline as a whole orients around a banal central premise; that there is value in the unpicking of what is deemed “normal”.

There’s nothing wrong per se with deconstructing normality — it’s a common impulse in much art and activism. But whether it is valuable is a highly context-dependent question. Sometimes to do so is just stupid — or even monstrous.

In October 2022, Dr Jacob Breslow, who was then associate professor of Gender and Sexuality at the LSE Department of Gender Studies, resigned from the board of trans charity Mermaids following revelations that he had spoken at a conference organised by a group set up by a convicted child abuser, where he said that “allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand minor-attracted persons”.

Manchester University postgraduate, Karl Andersson published a peer-reviewed article about his masturbation to Japanese shota — a subgenre of anime depicting pre-pubescent boys. Manchester University kicked him out, but only once his scholarship began to attract unwelcome media scrutiny.

Being an adult entails thinking seriously about where and when boundaries are necessary — but queer theory doesn’t really do that. Its emptiness was captured in 1995 by David Halperin, one of the discipline’s star academics who wrote: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers.” Chris Goode took advantage of queer theory’s obfuscatory capability to misdirect those who expressed scepticism about his work or asked too many questions. The sexually explicit Ponyboy shows became a sex-positive critique of heteronormativity, the making process concealed from outsiders by the always-locked rehearsal room door. It was queer, so it was ok.

To complicate things, “queer” exists today in two forms. On the one hand, it’s used as a single umbrella term for the alphabet soup of sexual and gender identities. This version is promoted by organisations such as Stonewall and parroted by organisations from Tate Gallery to Kew Gardens to English Heritage. The term offends many, and delights others. Last year, the UK’s only gender-critical lesbian and gay charity, the LGB Alliance, surveyed its members and found that the overwhelming majority disliked being described as “queer”. For many, it lives in the memory as a term of abuse.

Simultaneously, queer has its scholarly existence, as one of modern academia’s shoddiest branches of critical theory. Queer theory and the more general use of queer as a descriptor are not quite the same thing. Many of those who call themselves queer do not necessarily have any queer theory commitments — or even know what queer theory is. On the other hand, sometimes the two usages combine, and it becomes hard to know exactly who is talking about what.

Back in the 1990s I sometimes called myself queer. I liked the confrontational quality. Childish? Yes, a bit — but I was in my twenties. Then between 2005 and 2009 I led Manchester’s Queer Up North International Festival. Founded in 1992, QUN was Europe’s first queer arts festival, created as a UK home for the radical queer performance and filmmaking which had been sparked by the AIDS-era politicisation of gay culture. This was queer as an attitude and an aesthetic, from the films of Todd Haynes and Greg Araki to the theatre of Bloolips and Split Britches and the cabaret of Sandra Bernhard.

I first saw Chris Goode’s work whilst scouting for talent for QUN at the Edinburgh Fringe. He was performing a show he had written called “Hippo World Guest Book”. I bought a ticket because I was intrigued by the title. I’d heard that Goode was interesting, but I didn’t know anything about him. I don’t remember much specific detail about the show, except that I was slowly enveloped by a sense of wonder as Goode somehow assembled the contents of an online noticeboard for fans of hippos into a meditation on the possibility of human connection in a technological, transactional world. It sounds ridiculous. But it was beautiful.

Chris had an exceptional ability to spin a story out of the most unlikely materials. After Hippo World, I commissioned a play from him for QUN. The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley was a hit and widely regarded as one of his most charming, beautiful works. With a tone of magical realism, and a combination of live action and drawn animation, it told the story of an unconventional friendship between a 14-year-old boy (with the unlikely name of Shirley) and the (adult, male) superhero who moved in next door.

Wound Man himself was based on a drawing in 15th century surgical textbooks of a man punctured and gashed with knives, swords, and arrows, illustrating the kinds of injuries which might befall a man in battle. From this improbable source, Chris created a superhero whose superpower was empathy — he could take into himself the suffering of other human beings and, in doing so, make them somehow braver.

It might sound like an unpromising idea, but in Chris’ hands it was persuasive. “There is something so unguarded, almost childlike, about this show that you can’t help but fall in love with it,” wrote the Guardian about its 2008 premiere. “Sweetly eccentric,” said Time Out. It doesn’t seem quite as sweet now. Here and there, the text hints at something darker. This is from Wound Man and Shirley’s first conversation: “Why did you want to live round here?” asks Shirley. “It’s horrible.” “Well, I’m sure it’s going to suit me. It’s very peaceful here, that’s what I’m after. Fresh start, you know. Clean slate.”

It’s subtle, but the insinuation is clear. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now I realise that this show was when Chris first started to suggest his true nature in his writing — it was the beginning of him using his work to create self-justificatory worlds in which his desires could be normalised. In a 2011 interview, as Wound Man was being re-staged by Chris’s own theatre company, he spoke more frankly about what he was doing:

I knew that I was going to be wanting to do something quite ticklish in terms of the story I tell, which if you were to apply it to two characters in a less magic realistic context would be a story that would alarm and disturb people … It helps people to get to a place where at the end of the show they are really rooting for essentially a relationship between a 14-year-old boy and a 40-something-year-old man … I do sometimes want to go “You do realise what I’m saying right? You do realise what you’re cheering for?” and that’s kind of great …

The accusation of “grooming” is overused (especially on social media) but it’s a reasonable description of what Goode was up to. Contrast his words with the following by David Halperin, one of the world’s most successful queer studies scholars:

“Queer”, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative — a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalised because of her or his sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children — with, perhaps, very naughty children.

The italics are Halperin’s. How daring.

The majority of queer theory’s practitioners don’t deserve to be lumped in with those who have used it to attempt to minimise or trivialise abusive behaviour. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of queer theory scholarship where normalising the sexualisation of children is a topic of discussion.

Pat Califia — on the reading lists for queer studies courses at universities around the UK — is a notable example: “American society has become rabidly phobic about any sexual contact between adults and minors,” she wrote in 1991.

The work of some queer theorists sets the scene. “My own work doesn’t engage paedophilia except to note that the dominant sacralization of the Child is both a spur to, and a reflection of, a fixation on the sexuality of children that gets negatively expressed — through an insistence on children’s ‘innocence’, which is always excitedly imagined as under threat of violation,” said Lee Edelman in 2022.

The revelations about Chris Goode’s abuses changed how Maddy Costa subsequently came to view his artistic purpose:

Now that I see the ways in which Chris distorted and exploited the language of queerness, and resistance, I see Chris himself as an embodiment of toxicity, and it affects how I see his work. Ponyboy Curtis has become to me essentially fascistic: an exaltation of whiteness and masculine virility, erasing rather than engaging with difference.

It’s striking that Costa is unwilling to re-evaluate her political faith: Goode can be written off because it turns out he wasn’t inclusive, queer and anti-capitalist at all. He was a fascist.

What Costa is unwilling to countenance is the possibility that the politics might be part of the problem. Queer theory’s challenging of norms and boundaries can be benign, and sometimes interesting, but it can also lead to monstrous ethical positions. The queering of boundaries cannot be an organising principle for society — even a mini-society like a theatrical rehearsal room.

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