Alternative Nightlife

‘Sometimes it’s easier to let go of everything you feel in front of a group of strangers than it is in front of your lover,’ says Camille O’Sullivan.

Currently curled cat-like on one of the parlour couches at Sketch, this raven-haired beauty is a contemporary cabaret performer with a difference. Blessed with a Frenchwoman’s sense of drama, an Irishwoman’s down-to-earth humour and an almost obsessive love for the songs she makes her own, Camille mixes classic Brel with the likes of Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Bowie. She brings their characters to life with such passionate displays of emotion that a security guard, thinking she must be wasted, once tried to haul her off stage. Despite having enjoyed five-star sell-out runs in Edinburgh, New York, Ireland and Australia, her solo show, ‘La Fille du Cirque’, is only now making its London debut. And trust us, you will fall in love.

There’s a chance you’ll know Camille already, as Will Young’s performing partner in ‘Mrs Henderson Presents’. She landed the role after Ewan Bremner saw her singing (opposite a pair of homoerotically charged identical twins and a female sword-swallower with an allergy to metal) in twenty-first century circus show ‘La Clique’. And she has just finished making her second film, the American indie ‘Asylum Seekers’.

Camille’s performance in ‘La Fille du Cirque’ is itself a sort of professional schizophrenia. She opens with a graveyard rendition of Nick Cave’s ‘God Is in the House’, veiled in black lace with a voice that sounds like it’s recently been exhumed. Then, at a squall of sax from her band, she sheds the black coat to reveal a red silk corset and bursts into ‘The Devil’s Workshop’, making the word ‘hell’ quiver with eroticism. One moment she’ll be salsa-ing round the stage, wolf-whistling at the crowd and tugging the cork from a wine bottle with her teeth, the next she’s huddled in a corner, real tears glistening among the kohl. For the encore, if the venue allows, she sings ‘Is That All There Is?’ from a rope swing above the audience’s heads.

‘When people think of cabaret they think of Sally Bowles and fishnets and Dietrich,’ she says. ‘On my poster I have this very sexy image, that’s what sells the show. But when I get them inside I show them all the sides of a woman, the sides they’d be surprised by. I always think it’s interesting how some presume you’re only ever going to want to be seen as beautiful. It couldn’t be further from the truth. As a performer I couldn’t give a damn about looking sexy.’

When Camille shows people photos of her parents they say, ‘Ah, Jesus, that explains a lot’. Her Irish father was a record-breaking racing driver who met and eloped with her glamorous mother while in France, and encouraged fancy dress on family outings. Despite her bohemian upbringing, she spent years working as an architect before a near-fatal car crash encouraged her to face her fear of live performance.

‘I once had to do a corporate gig where I came out from behind a birthday cake in a blonde wig and fishnets singing “Dirty Lola”,’ she says. ‘The room turned out to be full of those I used to work with, open-mouthed. I found the old grey suits I used to wear to the office recently and couldn’t stop laughing.’

Now Camille dresses in the colours of the roulette wheel and lives a lifetime in fast-forward every night on stage. ‘Don’t be scared,’ she’ll sometimes purr as she sings from the comfort of an audience member’s lap. ‘It’s only a song.’ In Camille’s hands, it’s anything but.

Camille plays the Bloomsbury Theatre Mar 27.