Interview: 'We've Discovered This Multi-Layered Man' Scarlett Stitt and Dylan Aiello on Reevaluating George Michael, Drag and Cabaret in Their Show KISSING A FOOL

George Michael: Singer, songwriter, LGBTQ icon, and tragic hero? Kissing a Fool, an interdisciplinary Queer Cabaret show about the Wham! frontman might just have you revaluating everything you thought you knew about your mum’s favourite teenage heartthrob.  

We chatted to Scarlett Stitt and Dylan Aiello, the masterminds behind Kissing a Fool about all things Wham!, Parisian clowns, and their meeting at RADA.

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DA - "We weren’t working through the intellect. They very seldom said, 'okay, we're going to do this thing now in order to achieve this'. It would be like, ‘just hold them. Just hold that person and give them your weight.’ It's very intentionally designed to create a very intense dynamic between the group.” And I think once we started making stuff, that's when Scarlett and I really felt a strong, kind of creative, a synchronisation between us during the process."

SS –" I spent a summer at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris in 2018. It awakened this sort of ‘wow’, this is what it feels like to be truly with it, truly in my body, and to learn acting in a really all-encompassing way. I went for the theatre lab at RADA, and I got in as soon as I graduated from uni. I was lucky, it was very specifically the training I wanted, especially to work with practitioners like Euripides Laskaridis (whose show Titans recently played at the Coronet.)"

"[Training] started in an empty theatre. And everything is improvised around a trap door in the middle of the stage. [Exercises] escalated into involving loads of objects and costumes. I think by the end, there must have been about 100 objects involved in the show. And then at the end, all of these objects disappeared down … the trap door, and it was like, is it the end of the world? Is this wiping the slate clean to start again?"

On the surface it is hard to see where George Michael sits alongside clowning icons like Commedia Dell'Arte, Jerzy Grotowski, and Rudolph Laban. But surfaces are deceptive.

DA – “The [clowning] idea is rooted in fable, mythology, and archetype. And that's been a huge part of the way that we've developed our show. George Michael has always been something of a mirror for me. He came into my life at a time when I was at my most desperately disempowered. Praying for Time moved me not just because of what George Michael said, but how he said it. It was a political message bathed in poetry and sexuality. I started to become more interested in George Michael. And the funny thing was that I was just taking in his work sporadically. I was looking at this album and that album, and I couldn't figure out what he looked like. There was the suave handlebar moustache and quiffed hair of the early 2000s. But George Michael, bearded, had no resemblance to the Wham! George Michael.

“Who is this man and what is he hiding? As we've unwrapped George Michael through biography, through imaginative exploration, we've discovered this multi-layered man, actually very much like a man who's unsatisfied with every mask that he’s put on to be consumed by the public.”

“Somewhere along the line, his Faith era mask became a poison that was strangling him and he had to tear it off. And that happened successive times throughout his career - where he's doing this bearing it all, only to realise that that which he was bearing was just another mask. There is a kind of a drag dynamic there. There is a clowning dynamic where you think you're getting the real thing, but really you're being gagged in one way or another.

SS – “We were listening…we [were] using a radio interview that George Michael did with Simon Bates, and we were listening to a part where Simon Bates asks George Michael if he reads the horrible things people have said about him. George says that there was a time when [he] couldn't look at a paper, but it doesn't hurt him. Simon Bates asks, why not? And he says, well, because I know that people are kind of complaining about a person that doesn't really exist, George Michael. And I mean, George Michael isn't even his real name.”

Kissing a Fool is set in a really dark period between two of the singer's albums: the 1990’s Listen Without Prejudice and 1996’s Older. George Michael lost the love of his life Anselmo to AIDS and had been grappling with his sexuality, another performative element to his life magnified and distorted by the public light.

SS –“The show takes us through that journey. It's that journey from grief, through grief, to creativity. And I have to say that my work and what I always gravitate towards is an aesthetic representation of trauma and a healing through trauma. I'm very interested in demons. So my character in this play is a grief clown demon figure. And that demon figure takes George through this grief. Even if George doesn't want to go on this journey, it is a journey that has to happen for him to get him through to the other side of his suffering.

DA – Again there was this strange mirror for me. My father is from southern Italy and my mother is Canadian. These strange resonances between our lives drew me to him. He suffered a head injury, a head trauma when he was eight years old, which drew him towards music. And I've had several, one really significant head trauma, that changed the course of my life. This combination of musicality and theatricality without necessarily being musical theatre is a niche that I feel I occupy as an artist as well. So there are these interesting resonances.”

Clowning is on the verge of a full-scale breakthrough into the mainstream. The most recent Britain’s Got Talent winner and Edinburgh Fringe underground legend Viggo is an alum of Philippe Gaulier School in France (which counts Sasha Baron Cohen among its alumni).

SS – “If you look at anything that the Soho Theatre is programming right now, a good 40% are some form of clown show. I think a lot of those performers are taking it and playing with the form - they're blending cabaret, and they're blending live art, and they're using clowning in a liberating way. I'm obsessed. I’m a big fan of Lucy McCormick - her performance style is totally unique, and she's just one of many who are using elements of clowning to explore and explode a theatrical medium that is way more radical than what you see in the West End.

“Drag is also key. Drag elements are coming into our show in a really interesting way. We've got Wet Mess, a phenomenal drag performer who was just in Sound of the Underground at the Royal Court, coming in to work with us the week after next, and we'll be doing some movement direction and we hope to get loads of lip sync tips and interesting drag techniques.”

Kissing a Fool plays at The King’s Head Theatre from 30 -31 July, then Frankenstein’s Bierkeller at Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 4 – 13 August.

Photo credit: Matt Hass

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