Kate McLennan recently stormed the Melbourne Fringe Festival Awards taking out both the “The Melbourne Airport “I’m off to Edinburgh” Award for Outstanding Melbourne Newcomer” and the “Comedy Award”. I caught up with Kate to grill her on awards, Edinburgh, and hair products.
You just won two awards for your debut solo show. How do you feel?
Monday morning I woke up wondering if it had all really happened, then I threw up for a bit – but I did it with a grin on my face so that’s ok. I feel like I’m just starting to process it all, it’s been a mad week. I’ve been through this gamut of emotions from being completely delirious and excited to overwhelmed. Winning the Edinburgh award is just a dream because I honestly don’t know how I would get over there any other way. It’s also nice to know that my peers think I’m ok, which is nice to know every now and then because it is really hard to maintain a solid sense of whether or not you should keep going some times.
You’ve regularly gigged in sketch and with comedy group The Six – is this the beginning of a move away from sketch into solo stand up?
I don’t know, I guess this has given me the confidence to know that I can do it on my own, it’s probably easier to shop myself around the traps as a solo performer, but I do love performing with other people, particularly Josh and Mandy – I love those guys and I know that I will probably keep performing with them in the future regardless of what happens with The Six. As far as leaving sketch behind and pursuing stand-up, well…I’ve never really seen myself as a stand-up, I’m more a character actress who has funny bits in her schtik, I don’t really know if my content is funny enough to hold up amongst a bunch of stand-ups. There’s always the risk that I’m going to come off as the weak link. I think I will always do sketch, I’m one of those dags who likes sketch comedy, actually…I love it. I love the way sketches are formed, how contained they are, the energy required to make them work, the way you can take people into another zone with a sketch, take them away from reality and into this land inhabited by weird characters and scenarios, where the world is flipped and upside down, where the finer details are huge. I get a tingly feeling every-time I perform or write a sketch. It’s like the air in a sketch is electric. That sounds so dumb, but that’s how I feel. I just wish I had the opportunity to perform them more often – I guess the ultimate aim is to get writing with a TV show and see if I can get that off the ground, I had a baptism of fire with my network television experience last year and as much as I love performing I’m well aware of how a vision can get muddied, ideas get diluted by too many opinions (often ill-informed) being listened too, so I will keep plugging away until I am absolutely clear and certain of the idea I want to pursue and hope that the ABC will one day open up their arms to me when Chris Lilley has had a break-down and become a recluse.
Your best friend, Mandy Mannion, who is a fellow performer, produced The Debutante Diaries, what are the challenges and advantages of working with a friend, and fellow performer?
I honestly don’t know how I would have gotten through the whole experience without her, she was just so supportive of me choosing to go out and do this on my own, she knew that it was a project that I really needed to do and there was no ego involved at all. She cops a lot of crap from me when I’m stressed and puts up with more than any-one- I get pretty stressed out when I’m putting on a show and she is really calm and just gets the job done, she was really aware of my need to put the production side of things to the side and let me concentrate on the script and rehearsals. We have to be careful though that it isn’t all about work so we make sure that we go out and have a boozie night every now and then and behave like trash bags cos that’s really why we are friends.
Where did the idea for the Debutante Diaries come from?
The idea of doing a show set in a High School has been knocking round in my had for ages, even when I was at school I managed to really sit outside of it all and understand how ridiculous it was. When I was in Year 11 I wrote an instructional essay called “How to be a popular girl at Belmont High” – a step by step manual and a few teachers came up to me and gave me a bit of a cheeky pat on the back because it had been handed around the staff room, then the girls that I had based it on wanted to read it and they thought it was hilarious because they all thought that it was about some-one else. The more I kept thinking about my High school experiences and the more I talked to other people I realised that pretty much every-one has a fucked time, it’s so scary and awkward. I guess I wanted to explore what goes on in all the kids heads when they aren’t at school, how even the popular kids have their issues, how the teachers have just as many hang-ups. A lot of the stories are real and based on my experiences or the characters are all based on morphs of people I know. I felt quiet vulnerable performing something so personal but I think that that is what makes it work, that every-one could relate to one or more of the characters in some way.
A one person show is a challenge for any performer. What unexpected challenges did this project bring with it?
The main problem was just being completely sick of the sound of my own voice by about the second rehearsal. I also got a shocker of a cold a few shows in so it was tough being the only one providing the energy up on stage each night, you can’t really afford to drop your level at all when you are doing this type of show. The most draining part was running the show outside of rehearsals to learn my lines, I basically learnt the show in three sections then from that point I would run it every day, because my main problem learning it was remembering what character came next. Eventually through-out the run this became easier as your body memory starts to come into play.
You won, as part of the Newcomer Award, flights and accommodation to Edinburgh Fringe. What does the opportunity mean to you?
Cocaine. Lots of cocaine. Ha ha, it just makes me really bite the bullet. I had always put off the idea of going over to perform because I thought that it would be naïve to just rock up to the festival, not having been a punter first…but when is any-one ever going to give me five grand to get over there again? I mean I could go and be a punter next year and then get face cancer the next year and die and never be able to do it or decide I want to be a nun instead…so I think I’m going to perform the show and see what else I can rustle up. I know that it’s going to be extremely tough but I’m really interested to see how the show translates over there, to see if the trauma these characters in my show go through hits a nerve with the audience over there. It also feels like a big nod from my peers which is just bloody lovely, it’s great to have people around you like the team at Fringe and the comedy category judges who have just been so supportive and encouraging. I guess it feels like an award for Debutante Diaries, but also for all the other comedy stuff that I have been doing with The Six for a while – and that I guess that maybe my choices as a comic haven’t always been accessible enough for a manager or producer to come on board and sell, so really this is the best chance I have of getting over there. I’m just wrapped.
Will you be bringing the Debutante Diaries back to Melbourne/Australian stages?
Yeah, I’m performing an excerpt from the show at “Shirley You Can’t Be Serious” on November 7th and a little bit of character stand-up from it at the “Get Up, Stand Up” night that the McKenzie boys are putting together on November 9th. Then I want to have more of a tinker with the script and take it to Adelaide for the Fringe and then I’m signing up for another Comedy Festival, I think for once I may have a show that actually works with that comedy festival audience, but I don’t want to get too excited just yet. Every-one will be over me by then and want me to shuffle the fuck off I’m sure.
And, finally, Lou wants to know how you get your hair so curly?
I mix up face moisturiser and something that has an egg white consistency to it…I’m not sure what it is but the man next door leaves a pint of it on my door step every day, in return I let him peep at me through a hole in my bathroom door as I cut my toe nails.
Many thanks to Kate McLennan