Juliette
Burton – Look At Me
By Lee Bemrose
Arts
festivals anywhere in the world are competitive beasts. It can be
tough to get a gig and even tougher to get an audience, let alone
rave reviews. To achieve a sold-out season and a chorus of rave
reviews at the big daddy of all festivals – The Edinburgh Fringe –
you have to be doing something right. One person who has just done
all of the above is UK actor, writer and performer Juliette Burton
with her latest show Look At Me. Other capitals like Sydney and
Melbourne are missing out big time, but heads up Adelaide –
Juliette is returning for another appearance at The Adelaide Fringe.
If you like world class comedy with a big heart, read on.
So,
Juliette, how has life been treating you lately?Life
has been treating me like a pet; sometimes it gives me juicy bones,
takes me for walks and my little tail is wagging, and other times
life leaves me at home scratching on the door howling and making a
mess of the cushions. Ups and downs but mainly juicy bones of ups!
How
happy were you with how the show was received at the Edinburgh
Fringe?Ecstatic!
That's an underused word isn't it: "ecstatic"? Great word.
Anyway, Look At Me premiered at Edinburgh Fringe 2014, getting 5 star
reviews in national press, having sold out shows and at Edinburgh
2015 it had a total sold out run - every ticket that could be sold
was. It was incredible. A big juicy bone two years in a row.
What's
it like performing at that particular festival compared to others
you've appeared at?
Performing
at different festivals is like gathering a collection of friends all
from the same family; you have Edinburgh Fringe which is the biggest
arts festival in the world and why I even began in this career. It's
the BOSS of all festivals, so boss I actually moved to the city
because I loved it so much. Edinburgh's my best mate, in a way; that
mate who challenges you and helps you realise the best of yourself.
Brighton Fringe is like Edinburgh's kid sister; fun, arty, lovely but
much smaller. Melbourne International Comedy Festival was like the
cool hipster cousin who I loved being around and fancied a little
bit. And then there's Adelaide who's the second largest arts festival
in the world - the festival who's chilled, laid back and SO much fun!
Adelaide just wants to have a good time and I'm ready to be a part of
that again!
Have
the audiences at the different festivals been noticeably different in
any ways?People
the world over can be amazing. I think it's one of my favourite
things, realising that an audience in one part of the world can be
just as fun, vocal and up for it as an audience in a totally
different part of the world - similar characters pop up in different
corners of a country or the globe. I’ve made good friends in
Edinburgh who are so similar to those in York. I’ve made good
friends in Adelaide who were so similar to those in London. And
friends in Melbourne who remind me of those in Cambridge. We’re all
connected, we’re all the same really, if you focus on the
similarities and not the differences.
Tell
us a little about Look
At Me.
What's it all about? How did it come about?
I
first had the idea back in 2007 – what would happen if I swapped my
body for other bodies, having been the same girl in so many different
bodies naturally. I’ve been a size 4 (US size 0) due to anorexia, a
size 20 (US size 16) due to compulsive overeating disorder, I’ve
been a “healthy” size but ill with bulimia and I’ve been a
“normal” size and struggled with hidden illnesses like depression
and anxiety. It got me thinking – is what we appear to be who we
really are? I started chatting with friends about the idea and
everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, I spoke to had a story about how they
relate to their bodies and the outside world. And judgement too. So
when the Arts Council in the UK gave me some money to change my looks
in lots of dramatic ways I leapt at the chance to become, for a day,
a 90 year old lady, a man, I wore the hijab, dressed “provocatively”
and revisited my obese self – to find out how much appearances
affect who we are on the inside.
What
were those experiences like? Any surprises there?
A
LOT of surprises! I don’t want to give away any spoilers but being
a man unleashed some hidden sides of myself! Let’s just say perhaps
confidence verged into arrogance… Revisiting my obese body
surprised quite a few of my friends in fact…one of my friends
didn’t even recognise me and other friends who have seen the show
fancied me MORE in that disguise… And I wanted to reclaim my
experience of that body on that day. And being a 90 year old lady
revealed some truths; I felt rather liberated in some ways! To see
just how liberated you will need to join me at the show!
The
subject matter is, when you get down to it, pretty serious stuff. How
difficult was it to work it into comedy?
Not
terribly difficult. Some of the experiences I went through were so
bizarre that the only way to communicate them to audiences is with
honesty and laughter. Looks will change all the time and youth will
fade, it’s life’s great joke that we assign any real “value”
in our appearances and yet we do and we’re encouraged to do so.
Reflecting that judgement call through the show reveals the comedy in
ourselves and also in the absurdity of my own experiences. We all
have a day when someone judges us on appearance and the best we can
do is laugh about it.
Some
of the people you interview are dealing with some serious issues...
how did they react when they found out your show was a comedy?
For
the show I didn’t want it to be just my voice, so I interviewed a
lot of people, which I do for all my shows, to make sure the
questions I’m asking are universal as well as personal. For Look At
Me I interviewed 80 year old men and women, physically disabled
friends, thalidomide men, facially disfigured dudes, professional
models, fellow weirdo performers, transgender people about how they
relate to their bodies and how others relate to them.
When
I told these people I was interviewing my show was a comedy, I told
them well before I interviewed them, and they all unanimously loved
the idea! I think we’ve all thought how ridiculous it is to judge
on appearances; and as one of my interviewees said “Other people’s
ignorance is not and never will be my problem. And if other people
think that because of the way I look I can’t do certain things,
well, watch me!”
Watch
us! We are so much more than others and even we ourselves might think
we are.
We
know how the critics and audiences have responded to the show; what
have been the responses of the interviewees?
The
interviewees have their own mailing list who I email first to let
them know of future shows. I believe almost every interviewee
featured in the show has now seen the show…bar one. And that one
lives in Australia. So I hope they can come along!
All
the interviewees who have seen it have loved it; it’s their show as
well as mine in many ways. It’s everyone’s show who sees it and
takes something from it. An audience affects a show far more than we
realise.
What
are a couple of highlights for you in the interviews?
Other
than the incredible Adam Pearson, who I met thanks to the interviews
for this show and I now count as one of my best friends… we once
got so drunk that he ate a whole sharing sundae by himself. And we’ve
shared some pretty dirty Cards Against Humanity games… other than
him, there’s Geoff Adams-Spink who I met during my time working at
the BBC, a wise, funny, irreverent man affected by the thalidomide
drug. And there's Simon Minty who runs Abnormally Funny People. He
says his condition (he’s 3 ft 11) is one thing but his disability
is how people react to him. There’s also John Lyons, an
80-something year old poet, artist and author who says he thinks
about life, not age – with ALL my interviewees I watch their
interviews with the audience in the show and every single time I’m
struck by the collective wisdom of my friends! It’s a treat to
watch these pearls of wisdom back to remind me to listen to them and
adopt their experience myself!
Don't
tell anyone this, but when I saw your wonderful show When
I Grow Up
at
the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2014, I almost cried.
It was heart-breaking to see what you had gone through, but
ultimately one of the most uplifting (and funny) shows I had ever
seen. How do your shows affect you during the performances?
Wow.
Thank you. That’s a wonderful thing to share and say aloud. Well,
not aloud. This is written text. But you know, I heard it in my head
so we’re totally connected like that. Anyway, what was the
question? How do the shows affect me during the performance.
Honestly, every single performance I get emotionally vulnerable and
raw. But I count that as a victory because if I get to a point where
I can be so honest and vulnerable with an audience then we must be
really connecting, not as performer to audience but as human to
human. I’m often asked how I perform if I’m struggling with my
mental health problems and I always say because I know that as awful
as I might feel before the show, I will
feel
amazing on the other side, because I’ve connected with a whole room
of people who are with me on that journey… we’re in it together.
How
do you feel about humanity generally? Are we getting any better at
being human or are we still a bit shit?
What
a question! I don’t pretend to know the answer to that. I have to,
for sanity’s sake, believe in the good in humanity. For every awful
act that happens or hits us personally or hits the headlines there
are so many people out there who will choose the path of kindness.
There have been some shitty things happen in the world in the past
couple of years since I last came to Australia and each time I have
an increasingly greyer view of the world… and then a greater,
stronger, brighter revision of that – when I see the power of
loveliness rush through in the wake of shittiness.
A
news story I was involved in in May 2015 is one of those weird news
stories, It affected many and affected me personally. I relapsed
badly because of it. But then the rush of humanity overwhelmed me.
And it was immense. I talk about it in the show; we’re never really
alone. It just takes bravery to be honest about how we’re really
doing. Once I got on stage and started making jokes about the
situation, hearing people laugh about what I’d been through I
immediately knew it was going to be ok.
You
are coming all the way to Australia but not taking the show to
Melbourne or Sydney. This is a bummer for Melbourne and Sydney –
any chance this could change?
I
would LOVE to return to Melbourne one day and visit Sydney for the
first time… Let’s all keep our fingers crossed, and perhaps if
this Adelaide fringe goes well I can venture a bit further in the
future!
