The Fitzroy weather turns from unseasonably muggy to reassuringly bitter as soon as we emerge from Mario\u2019s on Brunswick Street, but cabaret legend Paul Capsis has come prepared and whips out an oversized umbrella. \u201cI knew to expect anything,\u201d he smiles, making it sound like a personal creed.<\/p>\n
Capsis is a born-and-bred Sydneysider, and yet he claims that \u201c90% of people I speak to think I was born in Melbourne, that I grew up or that I\u2019m based here.\u201d Perhaps it\u2019s the attitude \u2013 the spikiness and intensity of his onstage persona, or that slightly subterranean aura of the demimonde he carries with him in the real world \u2013 that makes him seem better suited to the moodier southern metropolis.<\/p>\n
Slightly built, with his long chestnut hair pulled back from his leonine face, Capsis is petite but striking as he swishes an ample scarf around his neck. While primarily a stage performer \u2013 he\u2019s appeared in everything from Bertolt Brecht to Rocky Horror \u2013 Capsis first leapt to national attention in Ana Kokkinos\u2019s Head On, the 1998 film adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas\u2019s debut novel, Loaded. He played the protagonist\u2019s best friend, Johnny, who moonlights as drag diva Toula in defiance of his strict religious Greek upbringing.<\/p>\n
Paul Capsis: \u2018I thought I\u2019d found my people, but I was a minority among my people. I wasn\u2019t fully embraced.\u2019 Photograph: Eugene Hyland\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father is Greek and my mother\u2019s family are Maltese,\u201d Capsis says. \u201cI knew this world. I knew these men.\u201d Patriarchal and socially conservative, it was a challenging and sometimes scary place for a young boy trying to navigate his gender and sexuality. \u201cBut it was always the women I looked up to in my family. The men were miserable.\u201d When his parents split up, Capsis moved to Surry Hills in the inner city, where he was raised largely by his maternal grandmother, Angela.<\/p>\n
Capsis maintains that he was \u201cso naive as a child. I knew nothing about sex\u201d. This changed dramatically when he started performing around the Sydney drag circuit in the late 80s; the bitchiness and misogyny among gay men in the scene at the time, he says, also came as a shock. \u201cI\u2019d entered a world that was so bizarre to me. The drinks and the drugs. I thought I\u2019d found my people, but I was a minority among my people. I wasn\u2019t fully embraced.\u201d<\/p>\n
As we pass the Provincial hotel on the corner of Brunswick and Johnson Streets, Capsis grabs my arm. \u201cThis is where I first met Ana [Kokkinos]! I\u2019d just read the book and she\u2019d asked to meet me, not to be in the film but to consult about the Greek aspects of the character.\u201d He went to the meeting in character and soon Kokkinos and the casting director were asking him all sorts of questions. He didn\u2019t realise it, but they were sizing him up for the role.<\/p>\n
In some key way, Capsis\u2019s performance in Head On came to define a certain queer, second-generation migrant experience, tied inextricably to old-world European traditions while desperate to carve a space <\/strong>in an Australia that spurned their ethnicity. \u201cI had a very conservative Catholic upbringing, sheltered in many ways.\u201d Angela \u2013 whom Capsis adored and would immortalise in his acclaimed solo show, Angela\u2019s Kitchen \u2013 was a stalwart presence, fiercely loyal.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was a child, I was adamant that I was a girl,\u201d Capsis recalls, matter-of-factly. \u201cI remember vividly the adults standing over me and insisting I was a boy and I\u2019d be screaming \u2018No! I\u2019m a girl.\u2019 It was pretty traumatic.\u201d But whenever the men of the house tried to punish him for his perceived femininity, Angela would intervene. \u201cMy grandmother would sort of protect me from all that. She\u2019d demand I be left alone.\u201d<\/p>\n Puberty was particularly monstrous for Capsis but also a catalyst for some kind of self awareness. \u201cWhen I hit puberty, my body started to go to war with me. Around 15, I started to negotiate what this all was,\u201d Capsis says, swiping a hand down his body. \u201cI said to myself, you are like a woman, you\u2019re a guy and you like men. You\u2019re just gonna have to deal with it. I\u2019m not going to have anything chopped off, I\u2019m not going to have anything added. I\u2019m gonna be me and hope for the best.\u201d<\/p>\n While Capsis acknowledges that a contemporary understanding of gender \u201cwould have given me words around my experience\u201d, he is unconcerned about labels and doesn\u2019t identify as trans. \u201cI\u2019m a feminine gay man.\u201d<\/p>\n Capsis began his career \u201cplaying dead women\u201d, impersonating (although channelling might be the apposite word) the often tragically complex divas of the past, legends like Janis Joplin, Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. Eventually, theatre visionary Barrie Kosky would conjure an ideal platform for this strange act of possession, Boulevard Delirium. It was arguably the sharpest, most dazzling piece of cabaret the country\u2019s ever seen. While it folded in some of the grotesquerie of drag, it seemed to spring from a deeper, more empathetic well.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not crawling under a rock for you. I\u2019m not going to hide for you<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Capsis nods enthusiastically as we discuss this, the husky crack in his voice opening slightly. \u201cThe women I was obsessed with growing up were all strong women, if not in their character then in their voice. People like Judy Garland, Edith Piaf, Janis Joplin. These women had something so powerful, but it comes out of their life experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Capsis\u2019s career has seen him play some of queer history\u2019s most revered figures, including Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp, as well as icons such as Marlene Dietrich. He\u2019s about to play multiple roles in Sydney Theatre Company\u2019s upcoming production of The Shiralee, and it\u2019s a safe bet that at least one of them will be a woman.<\/p>\n \u201cI come from strong stock,\u201d Capsis says, a note of pride peaking through as we huddle under the cover of a shop awning, rain really coming down now. <\/strong>\u201cMy grandmother literally gave birth to my mother during an air raid. She was tough.\u201d That familial connection has been one of the reasons Capsis has stayed in Sydney, even when a career in New York or Berlin beckoned. \u201cI did choose to stay close to my grandmother and then when she died, my mother. It was a decision I made consciously and I don\u2019t regret it.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Capsis: \u2018The women I was obsessed with growing up were all strong women, if not in their character then in their voice.\u2019 Photograph: Eugene Hyland\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Capsis\u2019s mother died less than a year ago and while he still grieves for her, he admits \u201cIt has freed me up. I can finally consider moving places, travelling for longer periods. I\u2019ve never been to Paris. Perhaps I\u2019ll go there next.\u201d He could always move to Melbourne, where he seems part of the fabric of the city, or revisit Malta and the cradle of his forebears.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve performed in Malta. It\u2019s fascinating but so Catholic.\u201d He is often mistaken for a trans woman there, and has been laughed at in the streets. It\u2019s the sort of thing that might cower or diminish anyone else, but Capsis \u2013 who was bullied mercilessly at school \u2013 is hard to intimidate.<\/p>\n He confronted them in his mother\u2019s language: \u201cI\u2019m not crawling under a rock for you. I\u2019m not going to hide for you.\u201d As he recounts this, someone turns from across the street to stare. Capsis laughs uproariously, but then turns to me fiercely. \u201cThe women I loved, they didn\u2019t put up with shit. They were fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Fitzroy weather turns from unseasonably muggy to reassuringly bitter as soon as we emerge from Mario\u2019s on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3940],"tags":[4080,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-366476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}