Virginia Gay is jetlagged after a London flight. She is functioning on little sleep, with the help of caffeine and drugs for her newly diagnosed attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, when we meet for a stroll on the windblown sand at Adelaide’s Henley beach.
You may know Gay from Channel 7’s All Saints, or Dancing with the Stars, or the ABC’s Savage River. The actor and writer’s lengthy bio also includes her stints as an “apocalyptic squid” in Vivid White, a “prize bitch” in The Beast, and “every stop on the bogan-to-hipster spectrum” in On The Production of Monsters. She has just been in London working on the new iteration of her play, Cyrano, and has flown to South Australia to be artistic director of the Adelaide cabaret festival.
Virginia Gay has many feathers to her boa.
Her newly clipped curls bounce and she emits an almost-visible energy as she poses for our photographer in what she calls her “camp Bruce Springsteen” outfit.
We’ll get to the festival. And to her amateur contortionist abilities, and her brief flirtation with accountancy, but let’s start with the ADHD diagnosis.
“I thought that everybody struggled in the same way that I did, and other people were simply better human beings,” the 42-year-old says of life before the diagnosis.
But during the pandemic she realised that everybody else’s brains did not, in fact, function like hers.
“I was like: ‘What do you mean that not everybody struggles to write a single email for days and days and goes into a guilt spiral about how they can’t and wastes all this energy on shame?’
“It’s been such a revelation,” she says. “It’s just about observing the patterns in my brain and recognising that my chemistry is simply different.”
She suffers “shocking insomnia”, she says, but now she works with her brain, instead of against it, which in turn reduces her anxiety. That means when it’s firing, it’s firing and she’ll stay up all night instead of being angry that she can’t switch it off. It means being comfortable with needing both habit and novelty.
The diagnosis has not just changed her relationship with her brain and sleep, but with her body, exercise and how she works. Which is hard, and fast.
As our conversation veers away from her neurodiversity, we’re on the esplanade, which winds past art deco beauties and modern monstrosities towards Grange.
Gay leaps over and charges through a lot of conversational ground. But what could be scatty conversation is instead invigorating, eloquent, and frequently funny.
She’s a walking performance, but without any irritating performative theatre kid theatrics. Bold, but disarmingly self-deprecating.
She’s full speed, fully fabulous.
This Adelaide cabaret festival is her first as director, but she’s been a fan of the gig for 15 years.
“There’s something extraordinary that happens at this festival that – to the best of my knowledge – doesn’t happen at any other festival in the world,” she says.
She attributes it to the immediacy and intimacy of the genre, and to the audiences.
“They go all in, and they bring their own personality and they dress up and they stay late, and they sing at the free events … smashing out tunes until 2am in the bar every night,” she says.
“It’s mischief. It’s late night and it’s sex and sass and wit.”
Modern cabaret, encompassing an often bawdy show, including dinner and drinking, began in Paris in the 1880s, at Le Chat Noir in Montmartre. Moulin Rouge came along soon after, with its famous can can dancers.
The rich and powerful mixed with the artistic and downtrodden as cabaret spread across Europe and the world, including Weimar Germany. Shows were hedonistic, but also politically subversive.
“It was born from protest and from oppression, so it’s kind of underground but deeply community building … and it’s always late at night in unexpected spaces,” Gay says. At its simplest, it’s turning stories into song. But she wants to push the boundaries of what she calls a “broad church”.
I ask her which acts are pushing at that edge. It’s clear she wants to name every one of her babies: Darby James’s Little Squirt (“a beautiful, intelligent, deeply funny piece of cabaret about what it is to be a queer man and a sperm donor”). Mel & Sam’s The Best Of (“completely bonkers scrappy little queer, big hearted insane show”). Then there’s a whodunnit, Murder for Two (a take on Jekyll and Hyde), Mark Nadler, Victoria Falconer, Reuben Kaye, Patti LuPone, and Dame Lisa Simone in a tribute to her mother, Nina.
Gay’s also keen to rope people into some “late night chaos” and will do cameos herself during the festival, including as a musical guest on a live version of Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales’s popular podcast, Chats 10 Looks 3.
“The first time I got invited over to a lunch with Annabel and Leigh (what a sentence!) … I sat in the car outside before I went in and I just CliffNoted the news. I was like, they are going to be talking about such important things. And I do not know enough,” she says.
“Then I was in there, and it was so charming, and so joyful, and they’re such love machines.”
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Gay seems entirely focused on the festival, if occasionally distracted by a passing dog, or a child, or an interesting house. But she can be yanked out to talk about the London project.
“I keep thinking about myself as like maybe the fanciest kind of FIFO [fly-in fly-out worker],” she says.
“What if I get like a sequined hi-vis vest and I wear it on the red carpet just with a spectacular pair of heels?”
She talks in awestruck tones about the actors they’re auditioning for Cyrano (her queer re-imagining of Cyrano de Bergerac), which will be heading to the Edinburgh festival in August. She juxtaposes her own nerves when she was auditioning, with being blown away by those auditioning in front of her.
But there are other strange echoes of her own auditioning past.
“So one incredibly charismatic man who we’re looking at [said he could play] bongos and harmonica,” Gay says. “And I realised that in my bio somewhere it still says ‘amateur contortionist’.
“What the fuck did I mean by that?”
What the fuck she did mean by that?
“I think the splits at parties used to be my 3am,” she says. “People would scream in horror, because I don’t look like the kind of person who can drop into the splits.” (Gay’s about six feet tall.)
The child of “loving, supportive” parents, Gay dropped out of English literature and studied at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. She gave herself until “the oldest age that I could think of” to make it.
“I’ll give myself until I’m 31,” she remembers. “Then I’ll be an accountant.”
The world of accountancy missed out and after decades performing on stage, her love of theatre has evolved. While she once thought being in the spotlight was the “be-all and end-all”, she now knows there’s more.
“I thought I could never find anything more exciting than live performance, and actually that’s a tiny part of the entire artistic experience,” she says. So what’s next?
“Show running; writing and producing television. And cabaret is like a masterclass in that,” she says.
This expansion has brought her two realisations.
She’s realised that “everything is about relationships”. About knowing people, trusting them. About being in a room and asking “are you as good as your word?” and “do we like the feeling of being in a room with you?” and “do we trust your taste?”.
The second is that “enthusiasm is perhaps one of the most powerful forces in the universe”, she says. When she was young, she says, it was “cool for the gothic, grungy, gen X Ginny to lack enthusiasm”. So she “kept a lid on her enthusiasm, her joy”.
As she’s saying this, she’s practically skipping along among delightful dachshunds and goofy mongrels. Dogs give her a dopamine hit, she says. And laughs. She laughs easily, and often. She looks as if she’s about to break in to song.
“This is perhaps the most extraordinary time of my life,” she says.