Singing In The Dark
The Age
Friday October 13, 2006
Don't expect sparkles from Camille O'Sullivan's blackly comic cabaret, writes Anthony Carew.
'I LIKE singing like a drunken man," Camille O'Sullivan says of her quaint performance manner. The Irish chanteuse, who describes herself as "more of an actor than a singer", specialises in the dark, blackly comic Weimar cabaret songs of Kurt Weill, Friedrich Hollaender and Bertolt Brecht but also interprets the modern-day equivalents, Nick Cave and Tom Waits.As a dramatic, theatrical performer, O'Sullivan throws herself into her songs, sometimes literally. "Somebody recently reviewed this show and wrote that I was really drunk, and that made me very happy. I thought: 'Ah, my acting is getting better!' "After edging out Minnie Driver and Natalie Imbruglia for a plum role in Stephen Frears' film Mrs Henderson Presents, O'Sullivan is gaining recognition as an actor. Recommended to Frears by Ewan Bremner, who had seen her perform in Edinburgh, O'Sullivan did the shoot with an ankle she'd badly sprained falling down a flight of stairs."For the whole time I had to say that I just had a weak ankle. I couldn't tell them that I was hurt and that I had to take painkillers to do the dance steps. I was really scared that I'd lose the part if they found out. I think right up to the moment I started filming I thought the part wasn't mine," she says.Mid-interview, O'Sullivan confesses she has locked herself in the men's toilets in the midst of a trapeze artist's birthday party on a boat circling New York harbour. "It's quite a night," O'Sullivan chuckles, in her soft County Cork accent. "Some of the people here look like they've come from a production of Hair from the 1960s."O'Sullivan grew up in Ireland, but her French mother's record collection - Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, Edith Piaf - fostered her love of chanson at an early age. Yet, after childhood dreams of singing and painting, O'Sullivan settled on architecture. But when she spent a year studying abroad, in Berlin, and saw a German cabaret show, it fostered a sense of restlessness."For the four years I was working as an architect, I think every Christmas when I went home I was still saying, 'I'd love to be a performer.' "Things changed after a serious car accident left her with injuries to her hands and legs that required a year of rehabilitation. During that time, O'Sullivan debated what she wanted to do with her life. Finally, "It was at that stage when I said, 'Damn it'," she says, and got to "run away with the Spiegeltent", touring the world with the Belgian "tent of mirrors".On her forthcoming DVD, Live at the Famous Spiegeltent, Melbourne, O'Sullivan - performing in front of adoring crowds - shows herself in command of her dark, masculine cabaret."I tend to go towards men's songs more because they're such heightened, emotionally charged songs," she says, "and I like that they have a harshness to them."But, O'Sullivan says, "a lot of people argued with me when I first started performing (men's songs), and that really surprised me. I couldn't believe that there was still this prevailing sentiment that, as a woman singer, you should just look beautiful and sing beautifully."People typically think with cabaret, with women, that you're gonna be either a Marlene Dietrich figure, or you're going to be Liza Minelli. You're going to be in the fish-stockings, kind of like a femme fatale."So to use the term cabaret sometimes gives the wrong notion of what you do. Cabaret does help people to understand that it's a dramatic evening, that I'm performing dramatic music. But I don't really like using that term because it can pigeonhole you, and people can come expecting sequins and boas."Camille performs La Fille du Cirque at the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall, on Sunday.Visit melbournefestival.com.au
© 2006 The Age