Interview: Virginia Gay

Virginia Gay – currently on the road as artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival – is ready for the Edinburgh Fringe. “I’m probably not going to treat it the way I did in my 20s, when I was like, ‘fucking Edinburgh!’” Gay says, pulling rockstar fingers. Berocca is the secret: “You put it in a champagne glass, and you tell people it’s a Pet Nat.”

The last time she performed here was 2012; this year, she’s making her comeback with the European premiere of her gender-flipped retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Traverse Theatre. “[The Fringe] is such a mecca for artists. There’s a beautiful democracy that I don’t think exists in any other artistic forum,” Gay says. “I know this is a psychotic thing to say, but it feels like a second home, and a kind of loving embrace.”

Gay, no stranger to either screen or stage, dedicates her Cyrano (which she wrote and stars in) to the “irrepressible magic of theatre”: liveness, togetherness, and collective possibility. “Cyrano is, at its heart, about the process of making theatre,” she says. After all, it is a story that begins in a theatre, and one about a writer who pens beautiful dialogue for another’s mouth: someone they think is more beautiful than they are.

“This [version], particularly, was a show shut down by lockdowns in Australia, and I wrote it in total isolation,” Gay says. “The feeling of existing on scraps of connection was something I used to think was a specific [to] womanness and queerness – and then the whole world shut down, and we were all existing on scraps. So everything about live theatre is about coming back to that sense of community.”

During its sold-out Melbourne run, Gay recounts feeding croissants to the audience, literalising the nourishing power of theatre; queer women coming back again and again, revelling in the story not just being “scraps”, but “a whole meal”; and someone even getting a tattoo of the play’s central image. “People bringing their sadness and saying, ‘It was allowed to blossom here and then go away’,” Gay recounts.

The audience is clued into Cyrano’s true feelings while other characters are deceived: to Gay, this complicity was the perfect vehicle to alter the course. “The original is a tragedy, and when you have a queer woman playing Cyrano, I will not have any more tragedy. We had to jump the tracks from a template that we get given about how to live, and the old stories we keep telling as performers: with the help of the audience.”

It’s always felt like a female and queer-coded story to Gay. “This idea of ‘Just be prettier and talk less; if only you could ask less poetry of the world’. This sense of looking at a beautiful man and saying, ‘Yes, you’re dumb, but you’re also everything I wish I could be’.” Fascinated by the meta-narratives of being a woman rewriting this story, Gay leans into how this deepens the betrayal of love interest Roxanne’s trust. “When [Roxanne] realises she’s been catfished and comes back saying, ‘I’m allowed to be shallow,’ the writer says, “‘Yeah, I insisted you be.’”

It remains an unapologetically joyous comedy. “When audiences are laughing, they will come with you anywhere, and they suddenly find themselves on the other side of history.” What might Fringe audiences feel, leaving the theatre? “The poetry of longing, and how exquisite a good yearn is,” Gay laughs. “Also the transformative nature of joy and hope. It’s hard to find a scrap of optimism and go, maybe we could avoid tragedy just this one time. But maybe if we all try, we actually can get a little more triumph.”