“You feel you’ve been on a wild night out”

The playwright, Jonathan Larkin, spoke to Damon Fairclough about Cherry Jezebel.

Could you tell us briefly what Cherry Jezebel is about?

It’s set in Liverpool’s drag scene and it’s about a queer family – about building a place where you belong, where you're safe. But it's also about what happens when that family you've worked to create starts to break down around you.

It's also about being queer and getting old, and being a drag queen and getting old. And it's about Liverpool too – a warts and all look at being queer in Liverpool, and what it’s like growing up here.

Have you always lived in Liverpool?

Yes, I'm from Dingle originally – I grew up on the street where they filmed Bread, in a very working class family and neighbourhood.

A lot of the time, if you grow up queer and working class in a place like Liverpool, your story isn't the most sanitised in the world, so it often doesn't get heard or seen on stage or TV. I think it's important to tell those stories.

Where did the idea for Cherry Jezebel come from?

I've always been drawn to the world of drag, and I knew I wanted to do something creatively with that idea.

I was originally going to write a musical about April Ashley – a trans pioneer from Liverpool. I brought that idea to the Everyman, who were really excited by it. But the more I tried to write it, the more I felt like I was writing a musical because I thought that was what I should do. Somehow I didn’t feel my heart was really in it.

At the same time, I've also got friendships with actual drag queens in the city – two in particular who have been around a long time, called Lady Sian and Tracy Wilder. They’re real survivors. They’d tell me stories and I started writing them down with my own flourishes, and I wondered if that could be my way in?

I felt there were already plenty of plays about drag queens, and about being gay and queer, but there aren’t many about what it's like when you're getting a bit older. So the two characters at the heart of Cherry Jezebel are no spring chickens.

They’re the characters Cherry and Heidi – but there’s also Pearl, who’s younger.

I realised I also wanted to write about the clash between the generations.

At the moment you've got older queens saying to younger queens, “You don't know what it was like, we fought all the battles so you don't have to.” And then you've got the younger queens saying, “You don't understand us, we're evolving, you're saying words that offend us,” – all this sort of stuff. 

So I thought what if I put them together in a play in the same physical space? And a club toilet made perfect sense!

Can you reveal a little about who these characters are?

Cherry’s a drag queen who’s gone through life being knocked about a lot. She's always looking for love, but in the wrong places, so she's always ended up with a black eye and a split lip. The adoration she gets from the gay scene about being an iconic drag queen is what keeps her going.

Heidi is her friend – much more grounded, more chilled, but no less fierce than Cherry. The difference is that she's also a trans woman, and she's never been able to embrace that – she's always been stuck being Cherry’s little sidekick. But now she's found love, and she's wanting to step out and be who she really is – her genuine authentic self.

Pearl is much younger – the kind of Generation Z-er who tries to patronise me online about how evil RuPaul is! But in writing the character and exploring why they’re the way they are, I've fallen in love with Pearl as well.

What I've tried to do is put these characters on stage who don't always make the right decisions, who aren't always very nice, who can lash out and hurt people. The point is to explore why that is, so you never give the audience an easy time.

How did the play make it to the Everyman?

I met Frank (Francesca Peschier, Head of New Works at the Everyman and Playhouse) who responded really well. She said, “We never see these people on a main stage,” so she got behind it and has been really invested in it since reading the first draft.

We went back and forth on it, and there was never any real promise of a commission at the beginning, but I knew I was gravitating back to the Everyman because it’s the theatre where I started out. Then we did a rehearsed reading of it at the Everyman during summer which went down really well.

The reading was essentially half the play – I always knew there was a bigger story to tell. But people responded really positively, so hopefully they’ll enjoy the full piece.

There's lots of comedy in the play – often quite savage – but it’s also very poignant. Is it important to get that balance?

When we did the reading, James Baker, the director, had a similar idea to me in that he really wanted to follow things through to their authentic conclusion – never sugar-coating anything. When something is savage, it can be quite funny at the same time – and that’s at the heart of the drag scene.

They’re performers so they have great comic timing don’t they? They know that what they're saying is funny as well as harsh.

Yes, it’s that razor sharp wit – they can just come straight back at you.

I think over the last decade we’ve seen a sanitisation of queer humour, but the drag scene is all about giving a big two fingers up to convention. I don’t want to soften the edges of that sort of humour. If someone's offended then that's fine, because you haven't actually killed them.

To what extent does this kind of humour also come from it being a very Liverpool play?

If the humour is specifically anything, maybe it’s specifically northern. There’s more of a piss-take quality to our humour – like a slap and a cuddle at the same time. But I did always hope it would be on a Liverpool stage, and I wanted to give a Liverpool audience plenty they’d recognise.

I think it’s important for the Everyman to put something like this on stage. Good theatre should hold a mirror up to the audience, and show them stuff they know and stuff they don’t. It’s about finding the balance between giving people something they can relate to, but then not just giving them an easy ride and being parochial.

Did you always have the Everyman in mind?

Initially, I was talking to Homotopia about maybe putting it on in bars and clubs, because the play inhabits that world. But when I met Frank from the Everyman, I realised we could actually do something here. Our aim is to have the best of both worlds, so hopefully what we're going to do is turn the stage into a club for the night so you feel you've been on a wild night out.

I'd love people to come out feeling like they’ve had one of those crazy nights where you end up nearly getting arrested, you get punched by a bouncer, you make the best mate you've ever met in the world and then they're gone by 5am.

Your first Everyman production was Paradise Bound in 2006. Are you excited to be working here again?

So excited! I've had a wonderful 13 years writing for Hollyoaks, which I still do and which is great. But I've wanted to come back here with the right project – and this is it. It's reminded me that I've got a voice and I've got something I want to say about the world.

Who do you think will love this play? Why should people come and see it?

I'd like queer people of every generation to come, but I'd also like people to see it who might learn something about that world, whatever preconceptions they've got about drag queens or trans people or non-binary people – or about confused straight lads for that matter!

I'd love to get a huge queer audience in, not just from Liverpool but from all around. And working class queers who don't hear their voices or see their faces on stage or TV very much.

We've worked really hard to find equality and get good representation on television – and we're getting it. There's great stuff on TV, particularly the soaps, but I think we're now walking this fine line where we're not allowed to show people in a bad light. Queer people aren't often allowed to be dirty, rude, unpolished – warts and all. Whereas drag queens who say really non-PC things, or non-binary people who say the wrong thing, or queer people who haven't got all the airs and graces, they don't really have a voice.

So even now, in the queer world, I feel like authentic, unpolished working class voices are still under-represented.

I'd like to be able to get those people in to see it.

What do you think the play says about being queer in Liverpool today?

There's a moment when Cherry talks about Liverpool as a city, and she says, “We've got two football stadiums at one end and two cathedrals at the other.”

It’s a key moment because that's something I'm trying to say about Liverpool.

We’re a very patriarchal city, and religion and football are two big areas that queer people have never done particularly well in – and Liverpool is dominated by both those institutions.

So when we're wringing our hands asking why homophobic attacks are still happening here, and why we had a spate of them when we were suddenly allowed out of our homes to get bevvied again after lockdown, we should be looking at that patriarchal culture and its effect on queer people and young straight lads too.

And that’s what Cherry Jezebel sets out to do.

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Cherry Jezebel will be at the Everyman Tue 8 Mar to Sat 26 Mar. Tickets £10 - £40.