Fairlight is a brand new musical performance which celebrates the invention of lawn tennis in Birmingham in the 1860s, by exploring one of the biggest issues in the modern game - queer invisibility.

The show takes place on a tennis court, and intertwines songs, readings, interviews and live tennis playing, all set to music based on the sounds of the Fairlight CMI – the world’s first sampling synthesiser.

It combines historical accounts with current testimony, inviting audiences to examine the issue of homophobia and discrimination in sport

Fairlight is the brainchild of composer Michael Wolters, who first heard about Birmingham’s connection to lawn tennis during the 2022 Commonwealth Games. “I was commissioned to write a show about homophobia in basketball, and our producer mentioned that lawn tennis was invented here in Birmingham by two ‘best friends’. It’s a hidden piece of Birmingham history that nobody seems to talk about.”

Lawn tennis was invented around 1865 by Birmingham solicitor Harry Gem and Spanish merchant Auguro Perera, in the garden of Perera’s Edgbaston home ‘Fairlight’. The two men later moved to Leamington Spa where they founded the world’s first lawn tennis club together. Many of the ‘laws of lawn tennis’ that they published in the 1870s still govern the tennis we see at Wimbledon today.

Were Gem and Perera more than just good friends? We will never know. At the time they were inventing their new game, homosexual acts were punishable by death, so any romantic or sexual connection would never have been talked about. ‘Fairlight’ depicts their relationship as a love story, told through original songs, set against the harsh reality of what life was like for LGBT+ people in the 19th century.

Researching the story, we found newspaper accounts of prosecutions of gay men from that era. “They are harrowing,” says composer Michael Wolters, “and the language used is incredibly damning. It paints a picture of a society where there was clearly no room for queer people. It’s no surprise that people at that time were not open about who they loved.”

160 years later, society has changed, but there have still never been any professional male tennis players who openly identified as LGBT+ during their playing career. To address the reasons, the show also includes interview clips with current tennis experts, including Ian Pearson-Brown, a tennis coach and founder of campaigning organisation Pride in Tennis, and Brian Vahaly, the only male tennis professional to come out as gay – an announcement he made a_er his retirement from the game.

“Their experiences are very different,” says librettist Alexandra Taylor, “but they share a lot of themes. Fear, shame and homophobia have not magically disappeared because being gay is no longer illegal. In fact, hate crimes against LGBT+ people are currently on the rise. Their stories go some way towards explaining why none of today’s male players have publicly come out.”

The full show will tour grass court tournaments in 2025, but there will be a preview of the first section this summer, on Saturday 20 July, at Edgbaston Archery & Lawn Tennis Society, the oldest tennis club in the world – less than a mile from where the sport was invented.

Tickets are free, and can be booked here.