The Fitzroy weather turns from unseasonably muggy to reassuringly bitter as soon as we emerge from Mario’s on Brunswick Street, but cabaret legend Paul Capsis has come prepared and whips out an oversized umbrella. “I knew to expect anything,” he smiles, making it sound like a personal creed.
Capsis is a born-and-bred Sydneysider, and yet he claims that “90% of people I speak to think I was born in Melbourne, that I grew up or that I’m based here.” Perhaps it’s the attitude – the spikiness and intensity of his onstage persona, or that slightly subterranean aura of the demimonde he carries with him in the real world – that makes him seem better suited to the moodier southern metropolis.
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 – he’s appeared in everything from Bertolt Brecht to Rocky Horror – Capsis first leapt to national attention in Ana Kokkinos’s Head On, the 1998 film adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s debut novel, Loaded. He played the protagonist’s best friend, Johnny, who moonlights as drag diva Toula in defiance of his strict religious Greek upbringing.
“My father is Greek and my mother’s family are Maltese,” Capsis says. “I knew this world. I knew these men.” Patriarchal and socially conservative, it was a challenging and sometimes scary place for a young boy trying to navigate his gender and sexuality. “But it was always the women I looked up to in my family. The men were miserable.” When his parents split up, Capsis moved to Surry Hills in the inner city, where he was raised largely by his maternal grandmother, Angela.
Capsis maintains that he was “so naive as a child. I knew nothing about sex”. 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. “I’d entered a world that was so bizarre to me. The drinks and the drugs. I thought I’d found my people, but I was a minority among my people. I wasn’t fully embraced.”
As we pass the Provincial hotel on the corner of Brunswick and Johnson Streets, Capsis grabs my arm. “This is where I first met Ana [Kokkinos]! I’d just read the book and she’d asked to meet me, not to be in the film but to consult about the Greek aspects of the character.” He went to the meeting in character and soon Kokkinos and the casting director were asking him all sorts of questions. He didn’t realise it, but they were sizing him up for the role.
In some key way, Capsis’s 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 in an Australia that spurned their ethnicity. “I had a very conservative Catholic upbringing, sheltered in many ways.” Angela – whom Capsis adored and would immortalise in his acclaimed solo show, Angela’s Kitchen – was a stalwart presence, fiercely loyal.
“When I was a child, I was adamant that I was a girl,” Capsis recalls, matter-of-factly. “I remember vividly the adults standing over me and insisting I was a boy and I’d be screaming ‘No! I’m a girl.’ It was pretty traumatic.” But whenever the men of the house tried to punish him for his perceived femininity, Angela would intervene. “My grandmother would sort of protect me from all that. She’d demand I be left alone.”
Puberty was particularly monstrous for Capsis but also a catalyst for some kind of self awareness. “When I hit puberty, my body started to go to war with me. Around 15, I started to negotiate what this all was,” Capsis says, swiping a hand down his body. “I said to myself, you are like a woman, you’re a guy and you like men. You’re just gonna have to deal with it. I’m not going to have anything chopped off, I’m not going to have anything added. I’m gonna be me and hope for the best.”
While Capsis acknowledges that a contemporary understanding of gender “would have given me words around my experience”, he is unconcerned about labels and doesn’t identify as trans. “I’m a feminine gay man.”
Capsis began his career “playing dead women”, 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’s ever seen. While it folded in some of the grotesquerie of drag, it seemed to spring from a deeper, more empathetic well.
Capsis nods enthusiastically as we discuss this, the husky crack in his voice opening slightly. “The 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.”
Capsis’s career has seen him play some of queer history’s most revered figures, including Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp, as well as icons such as Marlene Dietrich. He’s about to play multiple roles in Sydney Theatre Company’s upcoming production of The Shiralee, and it’s a safe bet that at least one of them will be a woman.
“I come from strong stock,” Capsis says, a note of pride peaking through as we huddle under the cover of a shop awning, rain really coming down now. “My grandmother literally gave birth to my mother during an air raid. She was tough.” That familial connection has been one of the reasons Capsis has stayed in Sydney, even when a career in New York or Berlin beckoned. “I 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’t regret it.”
Capsis’s mother died less than a year ago and while he still grieves for her, he admits “It has freed me up. I can finally consider moving places, travelling for longer periods. I’ve never been to Paris. Perhaps I’ll go there next.” 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.
“I’ve performed in Malta. It’s fascinating but so Catholic.” He is often mistaken for a trans woman there, and has been laughed at in the streets. It’s the sort of thing that might cower or diminish anyone else, but Capsis – who was bullied mercilessly at school – is hard to intimidate.
He confronted them in his mother’s language: “I’m not crawling under a rock for you. I’m not going to hide for you.” As he recounts this, someone turns from across the street to stare. Capsis laughs uproariously, but then turns to me fiercely. “The women I loved, they didn’t put up with shit. They were fighting.”