INTERVIEW:She takes wardrobe advice from her parents, describes herself as eccentric, and wouldn't have it any other way. ROISIN INGLEmeets the endlessly entertaining Camille O'Sullivan
CAMILLE O’SULLIVAN, the dark queen of alternative cabaret, is talking madness and obsession over tapas in a Dublin restaurant by the Liffey. Across the river in the James Joyce house, her colleagues in her latest theatrical foray The House of Lulu continue rehearsals without the leading lady. The singer’s face is free of make-up, her lips bear only the faintest traces of red lipstick. Even without the trademark warpaint, she is striking, those glinting brown eyes and expressive eyebrows constantly in motion. “I look like the cat dragged me in,” she laughs. She doesn’t, of course.
O'Sullivan is in sparkling form, if a tad worn out after Edinburgh, where in her sold-out show Feel, she delivered emotionally charged performances of songs by Weill and Brel and Bowie and Waits. As a performer she says she is growing "crazier" with each passing year. Her stage props in Edinburgh – horses' heads and a doll's house containing miniature versions of herself and her band mates dressed up as Sylvanian characters – were definite signs of a ratcheting up of the unhinged factor. "Somebody described me as being mad as a box of frogs recently and I said to my sister 'why are they saying that?' and she said, 'well, you are a bit full-on' and I suppose I am, eccentric and full-on and emotional," she says. "It draws some people in, but it's not for everyone."
She has enjoyed a busy few years, which have seen her sell-out the Sydney Opera House, perform in the Royal Albert Hall and in the West End, and more recently debut her and collaborator Feargal Murray's musical reworking of Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucreceat the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. (This project is scheduled for a world tour.)
On her one night off in Edinburgh she played to 6,000 at an outdoor festival in Cumbria as a warm up for The Stranglers and The Damned, where the audience were “dressed up as cats and dogs and pirates . . . it was a bit bizarre, even by my standards.”
Her latest project apparently contains much of what is “bizarre” and “mad” and “dark” although I can’t be too sure because the production team behind it have warned her not to be too specific about the story line. “They know what a blabber mouth I am,” she explains.
The Lulu Housesees the singer/actor/storyteller reunite with acclaimed director Selina Cartmell. The work is inspired by Georg W Pabst's silent movie Pandora's Boxstarring Louise Brooks, and by German playwright Frank Wedekind's 19th-century Lulu plays. O'Sullivan reckons she could do a PhD on Lulu or Louise Brooks now, so immersed has she become in the subject.
It's a site-specific work involving music, multi-media and art installations in the delightfully dilapidated James Joyce house, where the author's aunts once lived and where the film of Joyce's The Deadwas made. The audience will be invited to roam the house playing detective, unpicking the femme fatale psyche of doomed Lulu "and the men who fall for her", says O'Sullivan, who is "delighted" to be performing opposite Lorcan Cranitch.
“It’s a mixture of reality and illusion and obsession, it’s a fascination with Lulu and a fascination with Louise Brooks and with any woman who does that to a man,” she says.
The part involves O’Sullivan pinning up her long dark hair under a wig in the shape of an angular jet black bob à la Brooks. “It’s fascinating to see what a black bobbed helmet can do for someone. I wore it on a night out with the band recently and two of them said ‘Jesus Camille. I have an instant attraction to you’ . . . it’s like a Cleopatra thing, guys seem to be like ‘wow’ and it makes you think, hmmm, must buy more of those wigs.”
She revels in the dress-up aspect of performance, but in recent years was the subject of a sort of family intervention concerning her choice of stage outfit and mild addiction to corsetry. “You can become a cliched version of yourself,” she says of the cabaret costumes – fishnets, top hats, waist-cinching undergarments – that became almost a uniform for a while. She may not have a manager, organising everything from bookings to poster design herself, but her French mother is a close advisor when it comes to matters aesthetic.
“My mum said, ‘Camille if you wear the fishnets people will think you are burlesque.’ My dad said ‘You know you can wear a long dress and still be seductive.’ I listen to them both . . . the thing I am really interested in is showing every aspect of myself as a woman; I want to be liberated or really vulnerable or really dark. Some people might come to my show and think it’s all going to be about how seductive I can be, but that’s not what I am interested in. I am fascinated by a performer like Adele who is so captivating that it doesn’t matter what she wears.”
O’Sullivan famously left a solid career in architecture for this “gypsy lifestyle” and has remained close to her art and design cohorts who are experiencing hard times at the moment, in a bit of reversal of fortunes. “I say to them, ‘Can you learn to play the banjo?’ ”
Choosing an uncertain path allowed her “to run away from myself a little which is what I do onstage. It means your personal life takes a dive because you are the most present and alive and intimate onstage with a load of people you don’t know . . . you come off-stage and realise ‘Oh that’s why I am not in a relationship’.”
She suffers terribly with nerves, not when she is onstage, but in the lead up to a performance. The nerves attacked in Edinburgh, where at a Culture Ireland event she was unexpectedly called upon to sing at 9.30am. “I was eating a sandwich. I had to sing Amsterdam a cappella. The people who asked me to do it didn’t realise it is the thing I would hate the most, that it’s the hardest thing to do in broad daylight. I was dying inside. I think I had to have three gin and tonics to get over it,” she says.
O’Sullivan is endlessly entertaining. Thoughts on art and performance and seduction and obsession tumble out of her and she is in mid-sentence when the crew from The Lulu House call to drag her back to rehearsals.
She says she is making a new album and talks again about how excited she is about the upcoming tour of The Rape of Lucrece with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“When I got into this my family worried I was always going to be in a small cafe trying to make ends meet for the rest of my life,” she muses, gathering her things to head back across the river to The Dead house. It is safe to assume they don’t worry about that bit any more.
The Lulu Houseruns from September 28th as part of the Ulster Bank Theatre Festival
