Why Men Keep Frocking Up

Men in dresses have been strolling with us for centuries, but it seems that our appetite for it in Australia’s performing arts is inexhaustible. Martin Portus explores the phenomena with one of our most stylish exponents - Paul Capsis.

From the Greeks to the Elizabethans, from Georgian mollies to Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, from Betty Blokk Buster to the Footy Show, drag is a constant star but a new wave appears to be sweeping though this century’s teens.

Riding the wave is Paul Capsis. The career of this unique shape-shifting performer mixes cabaret with female appearances in a surprising number of classical dramas. Sure, he’s done the Rocky Horror Show and sung his way through Boulevard Delirium but he’s also been dressed up for Thyestes and Volpone, Barry Kosky’s classical epic The Lost Echo and for heaps of Brecht.

Now for the Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre, he’s working with Sisters Grimm channelling divas in Calpurnia Descending.  It is a witty take on film stars past. Capsis channels the ghosts of many divas, with perhaps Gloria Swanson and Bette Midler winning the race.

It seems a perfect and now appropriately mainstream drag partnership, working with the remarkable Ash Flanders, fresh from his own controversial role at Belvoir playing Hedda Gabler. While most critics have praised Calpurnia Descending, most were critical of Flanders’ Hedda. This critic described him in the role as“cold and moody ...adding a male aggression to Hedda’s feministic frustrations, and perhaps a queer petulance.”

Paul Capsis begs to differ from almost all the critics. “I thought it was very interesting, and not as terrible as people carried on about. I realised that having a man play her added weight to the woman in the production, to her isolation and the abuse she is suffering.”

Aside from broad comedy, Paul has a keen eye for the pathos which the right man can bring to a female role.  He has little interest in men just passing themselves off as pretty women and is uncomfortable with even the word, drag.  He sees however no female disparagement in the drag portrayal, even as he dramatises such fiercely competitive divas.

“But there is real competition between women, and especially in the theatre as women get to a particular age. I know that at my age of 50.  But why can’t we have new interpretations of women by men, and also of men by women?  I thought Robyn Nevin as Lear at the MTC was amazing – one of the best I’ve ever seen.”

He became a fan of Sisters Grimm last year after seeing their audacious STC production of Little Mercy starring Flanders in true Barbara Stanwyck mode. 

“Ash was the first person on an Australian stage who reminded me of me. When I met him afterwards, he said he’d seen me as Marlene Dietrich in my first glamorous role for Simon Phillips’ big MTC production of Arturo Uri. It was for me a complete makeover as Marlene. Ash said it was the first thing he saw as teenager at high school that changed his life; he could see many possibilities for himself.”

As for Capsis, he’s come a long way since singing Sundays to gay drinkers in the Albury Hotel’s piano bar in the late 80s.  I remember seeing him later with his long thick hair being an effeminate ethnic schoolboy in Nick Enright's play about bullying, Playground.  It was 1996; Capsis stood out but I wondered how easily such an actor would find roles on our stages.  It was hard then to imagine that he’d be plucked out for roles like Pamela Rabe’s mother in the STC’s Tales from the Vienna Woods.  And all the more surprising perhaps, since he was brought up a working class Maltese Greek boy in inner Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. 

“I was a very effeminate child at school and I had problems because of that, and suffered. I lived with my grandmother who didn’t make me much aware of it but my father did – that men were to behave in a particular way.”

“And in Surry Hills then I remember passing Nimrod Theatre (now Belvoir) and becoming aware of these men on billboards, and then on the covers of magazines and newspapers. And glam rock as well.  These men were playing with gender – the lipstick, eyelashes, the mascara – but with the stance of toughness as well.   And I realised later that these tough divas were drawing in turn on the great divas of the Hollywood past, reinterpreted for the 1970’s.”

Undoubtedly, forty years ago, drag dressed up a new outrageousness, an assertion of sexual identity, and a sheer liberation from sexual stereotypes. Their taste may have been dubious but leaders were Reg Livermore as Betty Blokk Buster and then Wonder Woman, and Grahame Bond and the Aunty Jack Show.  And new plays emerged like Steve Spears’ international hit, The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, with Gordon Chater, and Peter Kenna’s Mates, while in other spaces gender-bending theatre-makers like Lindsay Kemp, Michael Matou, Doris Fish and Cabaret Conspiracy flashed brightly. 

In cinema in 1970, the now iconic film The Set featured drag queen Ken “Kindy'" Johnson, while The Naked Bunyip included both Carlotta and the irrepressible Edna Everage. The matey national silence on what was really under Edna’s dress continued through the Barry McKenzie movies, even to the point of then Prime Minister Whitlam having a cameo in which he knighted the housewife and created the ever after monstrous Dame Edna.

Men in dresses make interesting appearances in Australian cinema, even from its beginnings, but the climax certainly came with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Priscilla stands reasonably alone in the 1990s period of more cautious politics and less theatricality around sexual difference and human rights – other than the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras of course. The more recent stage version of Priscilla – and allied TV reality show taking drag-clad punters up north to build a “wave of acceptance” – heralds a more drag- interested chapter today. 

The telemovie Carlotta this year was landmark if romanticised storytelling about the life of Australia’s most famous drag queen – even if she was played by a woman. Geoffrey Rush has already elevated the traditional panto dame to new heights with his extravagantly dressed Lady Bracknell in Melbourne.  In Brisbane Gerry Connolly, beloved for his Queen Elizabeth II, has just left the stage after rather inexplicably playing the female housekeeper in a version of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. 

And so the parade continues – with TV, film and big theatre stories around names such as Courtney Act, Trevor Ashley and Vanessa Wagner.

For Paul Capsis though, it’s all part of being a jobbing actor, working with character and voice to perfect the role, no matter what you’re wearing. He’s got his eye on Richard III.

Originally published in the November / December 2014 edition of Stage Whispers.