Celine Lowenthal is a London-based theatre-maker, and is co-founder and director of Pecs Drag Kings. Her most recent shows have been Red Palace (The Vaults), Sex Sex Men Men (The Yard), Kingdom (Camden People’s Theatre), Divine Proportions (The Vaults).
This interview is condensed from a longer version.
TH Can you briefly explain how you read gender?
CL I suppose on a simplistic level, there's the categories that might be on someone's passport, male, (cis), female (cis), and some countries have introduced an ‘X’ too. Then there's how we actually feel about our own gender, which is infinitely varied, with many layers and nuances, and that has fluid boundaries. Which makes the passport categories seem very limited and even oppressive by comparison! For example trans, non-binary, gender-fluid, genderqueer, gender-non-conforming, androgynous, butch, femme, are just some of the other umbrella terms that might sit outside of the binary, and describe the many genders out there.
I would describe myself as a cis-gendered woman, and within that I am incredibly femme, and that's a really important part of my gender identity. But I also enjoy my masculinities, and the oscillation between those two, and the ability to choose on a given day how I inhabit those poles, is really important to me.
Something that is amazing about queerness is that it opens up the conversation about everyone's gender. By making work that is engaged in questioning those more rigid categories, and exploring the creativity of what gender can be, I am asking the audience to think about that in relation to themselves, in a hopefully liberating way. There’s that way we talk about capitalism, that 'it's the water that we swim in' without noticing it, and I think the same is true of gender (probably not unrelatedly). I feel very suspicious of, or nervous around work that reinforces those categories. I think there's a lot that does that unknowingly.
TH What is it that you dislike about the term ‘gender blind’
CL Well, firstly, the language is ableist. And also, in its intention it feels like putting on blinkers rather than opening out. The casting I see where it looks like someone's maybe used the term 'gender blind' is where it's a Shakespeare where there's maybe one part that would have been a male part, and that's now being played by a cis woman. Shakespeare's such a potent one, because it has a history of being creative with gender in performance, and the role of gender in the plays is so fluid - like Twelfth Night - creating such queer interactions between characters. The all-female Shakespeares are also great, but even then, ther can still be something rigid in it. My thought is: where is the space for non-binary performers? It remains binary. It doesn’t mean the work isn’t good, but there are so many more possibilities out there!
TH So, you’re working with a casting director to cast a show you’re directing. How do you want to go about that process?
CL I would love it if every time I went into a casting process, with every role, whether it's a play or devised, there's a question mark put over the character and performers' genders. We might question our assumptions by bringing in people to read who aren't of the gender we might have assumed that role to be, and therefore give the text the widest benefit of the doubt. If it’s devised, whoever is in the company is empowered to be part of the conversation to decide upon the gender of the character they are playing.
TH Practically, how do you reach the people that you want to reach? Do you use Spotlight?
CL Spotlight is hard, because of exactly this; it asks you to decide if the role you’re casting is male or female. I think that it's one of the most limiting aspects of casting. With Red Palace, we put out a casting call and it was spread as far as possible on social media and emailed to different companies.
TH I assume that you put that casting call in specifically queer artist spaces, where you knew you were going to reach the people that you wanted to reach?
CL Yes. It is laziness to assume that, for example, there aren’t many trans and non-binary actors out there. So many brilliantly talented artists are overlooked that way. It reflects an inability to look outside of the structures that exist. I remember watching a Milk Presents show called Bullish which I believe was all trans masc or non-binary cast. Leo Skilbeck, who wrote and directed that show, told me that they were told it wasn’t possible to get that many trans performers, but they did, and they found them through working harder, looking in unexpected spaces. Queer performers are forced to sit outside of the existing structures, because, for example, on Spotlight there isn’t a non-binary option for performers. Institutions are tying themselves in knots at the moment trying to find out the best configuration of those kinds of multiple choice forms. Something I've seen that’s great is just a box where you fill in whatever you want to say about your gender, which is such a simple and generous offer. There's something about the power shift that it's emblematic of - you don't have to fit. It's your power. It's your life - which I think is really beautiful.
TH In the casting process, you might not be at the end of that thought process of the gender of the character you’re casting?
CL I want to empower everyone in the room to be able to actively have a conversation around what their gender is, what the gender of their character might be, what the discrepancy might be, and whether that is a ripe place for performance and creativity. Part of the history of this is that those who hold a position of power, straight and cis people, have had a hegemony over both queer and straight roles, think Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl, and there's something very problematic in that. And this applies also to race and disability too - Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, Bryan Cranston playing a quadriplegic in The Upside in 2017 - and of course even more so when these overlap!
TH So with Red Palace, how did you specifically think about those characters, casting and gender?
CL The piece is based on The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, Grimm's tales and Hans Christian Andersen fairytales. All our characters on the page retained the pronouns of the character they were based on, but we (myself and the playwright Cressida Peever) knew that we were going to develop those characters’ genders in the rehearsal room, and we weren't going to be casting any cis-men. That was the premise.
TH Why is that?
CL We did it last year for Divine Proportions and honestly, it just felt like a no-brainer for the work we’re making, it was an easy decision. It’s also about creating a safe room, where there's no question of anyone feeling excluded or disempowered on the basis of their gender. I have found those rooms super creative and supportive, and that's not to the detriment of the amazing male artists that we've all worked with. It's a safety and creativity combo.
TH When it came to seeing people for roles, what was that process like?
CL The script had pronouns within it, but we were very aware that we wanted the performers to bring a significant amount to that conversation. We gave everyone extracts from all the characters, and allowed them to choose who they wanted to read.
In rehearsal, after a few days of working on each character, we talked together about what we thought about the gender of that character. Gender was collaborative, two multi-rolling actors could play the same character with a different idea of their gender. For example, with one character, some actors are playing them as a straight cis-man, some are playing them as a queer woman, and some of our non-binary performers are playing them as non-binary.
TH How does that affect the audience's experience?
CL The queerness of the piece is kind of stealthy and magical. A dancing girl falls in love with a mermaid, interspecies queerness! But also a femme cutie falls in love with a masc cutie, and the audience’s interpretation of that romance will vary night to night, depending who is playing the roles, and how they’re playing them. Sometimes queer narratives can be really burdened by the expectations put on them and the need to fulfil all our hopes and dreams as a queer audience. There's a lot of pressure, for example, for a happy ending. We managed to avoid some of that pressure by being fluid with the characters’ genders, and also of course setting it in a magical realm!
TH In Red Palace you are dealing with characters from fairy tales. What about plays that ask for more specificity in terms of gender?
CL There's certainly texts that I would look at that are very binary within themselves, and the relationship between the male and female characters as written is reliant upon assumptions about their gender and the gender of their performers. If it's asking you to tell a story about a relationship between a man and a woman, is it about saying yes ok, or is there space within that? Every cis woman and man has a complex gender. Is it possible to bring that conversation to the rehearsal room?
TH The work that you do with Pecs Drag is all about the performance of gender.
CL Yes, totally. Cabaret is fantastic for this kind of work because there's so many layers. I think that’s why I find naturalism difficult sometimes: because it's asking you to be literal about gender in some way. Drag and cabaret are immediately not literal. In a cabaret format, there's an ability to look the audience in the eye and ensure they're part of the conversation, and layers of gender can be explored in ways that are also incredibly entertaining. A lot of the conversations that society is having around gender is really hard for a lot of people, especially for those who struggle with gender dysphoria. The press and the media are so aggressively and dangerously transphobic at the moment. Drag allows us to swim up above and think about gender in all its creative and imaginative forms.
It’s why Drag Race, despite my many problems with it, is also positive; it's inviting a cis-gendered viewing public to engage in the creativity of gender. It's still limited; packaging up some of the most palatable aspects of queerness and selling them to a straight audience. And Ru Paul has said and done very problematic things in the past, for example, saying drag is only political if a man is doing it, and only allowing Queens to compete, as well as mistreating and excluding trans drag artists.
TH Where do you see Pecs in mainstream? Or do you? Does that matter to you?
CL It’s really complicated. For example, Red Palace, a queer piece, is a commercial venture: it's deliberately aimed at not niche theatre-going audiences. I think with drag, you absolutely don't want it to remain in the queer bubble because then you’re preaching to the choir, but at the same time, it is a gift for the community. It's something we've grappled with over the years with Pecs; maintaining making work that we know is creating a safe space for the queer community and celebrating our culture, and also making work that is deliberately reaching a straight and cis-gendered audience.
And ‘Queer Theatre’ isn't a genre. Anything you can apply the word queer to is queer theatre. But queering is also an action of a kind, a political position and an artistic position. All credit to Leo Skilbeck, Milk Presents for my depth of understanding of this, because I've learnt it all from them; to make something queer is to disrupt it, to question inherited structures. A queer piece of theatre isn't just a piece about same-sex people falling in love, though it can be. It might be also structurally queer or aesthetically queer. I think of it as related to mess and non-linearness. When we were doing our last big Pecs show Sex Sex Men Men at The Yard, we had this strange moment when we were put into a double review in the Guardian with When the Rest of Me Floats by Outbox Theatre at The Bush, which was on at the same time, because all ‘Queer Theatre’ must be in this same category! Even though we were very different shows. It felt undermining. But at the same time, I understood why, and it was wonderful to be rubbing shoulders with that show. There was lots of solidarity between us as companies.
At Pecs one of our core values is that we maximise the political impact of the work. And that’s in conversation with the mainstreaming of it. Imagining a Pecs TV show and who would green light that and what they would be asking of that output? You look at something like Queer Eye which is so radical in so many ways...
TH ...It's doing that thing of queering the world, as an action, to everyone.
CL Totally! And that’s amazing. But is also quite capitalistic, and that’s just down to the format of the show. It's also about the expectations of audiences and the industry; drag and cabaret are almost invariably thought of as ‘not really art’. The assumption is that drag is messy, DIY, maybe not necessarily thought through in an ideological or thematic way, and that's why it might not easily be viewed as mainstream. It’s not ‘shiny’ enough. I love bringing rigour to something that has these assumptions made about it. There's also an ego part of me that wants it to be lifted up and viewed on the same level as more mainstream work.
TH It’s wonderful hearing about how you make gender such a central part of the work you make.
CL It's taken a while to get here. It's also that the world is changing. Not that long ago we wouldn't have started a process by checking in with everyone’s pronouns, but now we always do, and that’s partly because the world is now having a conversation about pronouns. ‘They’ is the Dictionary’s word of the year! I think of the rehearsal room as a mini utopia, where you can set the rules of how people treat each other. I am a cis-gendered woman, so I move through the world very easily in certain ways. If I'm asking someone to come to my rehearsal room every day and they are less safe than I am in the world, then their safety is my priority. If I'm also asking them to sit and talk about gender, which is something they have opted in to do, then I have a responsibility to them. That's also why it has to be part of the work, because it's all connected. If you’re working with queer artists, then the maintenance of mental health will obviously be a priority. You have to opt into that work.
TH On your shows, do you have someone with a specific role for wellbeing?
CL I think about it as split between myself, stage management and our producer. I am explicit about that to the cast, and tell them that they are there if there's ever a problem with me, or if there's anything they don't want to talk about in the room, there are other people to go to. There's a pastoral and holistic role that stage management are actively taking. If there's a conversation that comes up in the room that you think might have made any member of that room uncomfortable, then I try to check in with people individually afterwards. Again, that's a Leo Skillbeck thing!
Something we did on Sex Sex Men Men, because the piece was all about sex, is we had a really rigorous safeguarding policy and used content warnings in conversation; I've taken that idea into my life as well. It's about recognising that what you're talking about might be received very differently by different people. We all have our vulnerable places, and those places are really important in a rehearsal room for making art, but they can only be accessed properly if you’re being held. I think the work is so much better for it.
I know there's lots of directors, maybe of an older generation, for whom this has never been part of their practice. There's some male figurehead directors who aren't interested in taking care of people, but are interested in the edgy extremeness of the work, and get there through whatever means possible. They don't mind about the collateral damage. Perhaps they even enjoy the damage as they think it validates the work. I think that’s stupidity rather than rigour.
TH In the last few minutes, is there anything you feel we haven't covered?
CL Yeah: that I definitely don't know everything. It's easy to talk with seeming authority but I don't feel I have any authority whatsoever. I am sure I will get it wrong and continue to get it wrong.
TH To make a safe and open space you will necessarily be going into unknown territory, so I guess it's about being open to the possibility of making mistakes?
CL And that openness to making mistakes is what we all need in order for this conversation to keep going. It's so easy to be defensive or to feel attacked. For example, as a casting director who has never had to think about this before. That's ok. We end up having rigid conversations where someone feels accused of doing something wrong, and because of the pain of that, digs their heels in. That reinforces the two sides of the argument and I think that's where the worst polarising of these conversations happens.
Ending up at this place in the conversation makes me feel incredibly vulnerable. I want to do all the things I am talking about, and I do my best but they also cost a lot in some ways, whilst also being incredibly rewarding. It's actively going towards what's not simple, and embracing that because you think it’s important, but it is exhausting. I think it's why in my own life I really really take care of myself and prioritise times when I'm not making a show, to rest. It's all part of the same thing I think. How we take care of ourselves and take care of each other. It's the only way.