Watching the 1975 cult documentary film Grey Gardens about “Big” Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little” Edith Bouvier Beale, is like hanging out with family you only see at Christmas for an hour and 45 minutes and seeing yourself reflected back.

There’s Little Edie in her signature black shroud and transatlantic drawl, opening a book on astrology to tell you all about her Sagittarian lovers. There’s Big Edie in a single bed surrounded by cats and covered in newspapers, dressed like she’s in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

Like that infamous magnifying glass Little Edie uses to zoom in on her astrological chart, Grey Gardens had the unintentional effect of zooming in on what defines a queer icon: fragility without shame; pain without self-pity; and a theatrical commitment to personal expression rooted in an earnest need for connection.

In Dino Dimitriadis and Victoria Falconer’s occasionally brilliant adaptation, House of Rot, this classic of queer cinema is stripped back to its foundations. There are some explicit references to the original film peppered throughout – a classic Little Edie quote to signal a scene change, a can of tuna, a black headpiece – but Dimitriadis and Falconer favour a liberal approach more interested in...