Coral Bevan is going to arm wrestle you
Actor, clown and drag king Coral Bevan on how they get their two alter egos to stage on time.
The morning of a show I try to calm down. If it’s a weekend I might go to a car boot sale to calm my nerves and I also love a gözleme so that tends to be my treat. Then I triple check that I've got everything and arrive at the venue like eight hours early, just in case.
I’ve managed to fit all my props into one massive suitcase with maybe a couple of bags hanging off the side. The biggest thing when I’m playing Fisherman Jon is Jon's fishing rod. He's got a massive rod.
I like to do half my makeup before I leave for the venue. Fisherman Jon only has two teeth, so for him I’ll do my teeth (I use a theatrical paint to block the other ones out) and get on the tube. That usually strikes up a conversation which is always fun. With Wayne Wayneson, I’ll travel wearing just my moustache which also creates lots of fun interactions. If I also have on my cowboy hat and chaps on people will greet me with a “Oh Howdy partner!” A lot of people's perception is that Londoners don't like talking, but you know, they definitely will and they’ll have a laugh with you too.
Once I get to the venue, I slowly get into the rest of my costume. For Wayne I have this amazing silicone flaccid penis. Once you put it down your trousers you really do take on this new persona of “yeah, I'm a guy, yeah, I'm a man”. For Wayne the penis and moustache is a big part of getting into character for me.
I’ll also listen to the music that that character would listen to. So Wayne listens to a lot of ACDC, Def Leppard, etc. stuff that you can really rock out to. When there's a solo, he's probably doing some air guitars in the dressing room. Jon’s more into sea shanties.
My amazing team will probably also be there too. Ricky Hunt and David Aylwyn and myself co-wrote both shows together. For Fishman Jon, Ricky and David directed it. And Ricky has directed Wayne Wayneson. Either one or both of them will be at the show and they're honestly just great. We’re all performers, actors and comedians and we’ve known each other a long time from the immersive theatre world - secret cinema mostly. Having them there is calming but also so silly. They’re normally doing the tech or directing and they’re great at hyping me up before the show.
With Wayne, before the show, I’ll go out and see the crowd and chat to them. Wayne is slightly obsessed with being a tough guy so he’ll challenge the audience, like “Oh, so you think you’re rock hard?” and then arm wrestle them or chest bump them. I like the dilemma of going up to audience members that are clearly way stronger than me and challenging them to something like an arm wrestle. It’s playing this game of them knowing that I'm a woman dressed as a man, but who thinks that they could take them on. And the dilemma of whether they should beat me or not.
The first five minutes of the show is one of the most important bits for me. If you get the audience on side then you know they’ll forgive anything that happens later. But in those first five minutes, if you lose them, it's really hard to get them back. It’s about getting tapping into this childlike element where they know I'm about to play a fun game with them all and they’re all part of it.
During the show I invite audience members to participate. I pick someone in both shows that becomes quite significant in the narrative. I’ve done immersive theatre in the past and that’s all about how you ask someone to do something without directly asking them to do it. It's like the way that you say it and the very specific words you use to imply something.
I want people to feel safe when they're picked on to perform or on stage. When I’m an audience member, I panic if someone picks on me. So I feel like I can relieve a lot of that panic for someone by shaping the interaction in a certain way that they feel like I'm holding them. The audience will always find them funny, no matter what they do, because I've shaped it in a way that it can't go wrong. I think that's really important for people to leave and not feel like they didn't perform well.
The first thing I’d do when the audience has left is probably get myself a whiskey! Once we’ve packed up and got out I love talking to the people that have come to watch. Especially now when going to the theatre, with the cost of living, is so much. So for people to choose to come and watch me feels amazing. I’ll probably announce that we’re all going to the pub and then we de camp en masse.
After that I'm probably feeling a little bit merry and I’ll head back to the tube. I love sleep and I’m really good at it. Once I get home I just clamber into bed and that's it. Good night. I've read it somewhere that a doing a show has the same amount of adrenaline as a car accident. You've got so much pumping through you that after the first night you feel drained. So it’s important for me to get my sleep and anyway I'm a bit of a granny; I can go to sleep at like nine if I wanted to.
Wayne himself started a very, very long time ago. I took Daisy Doris May on a friend date I suggested we dress up as men for fun and go to Zedel’s. Neither of us had done drag before. We just decided to go on this silly date to this night called the Old Fashioned which was sort of like karaoke, but with a live jazz band you had to sing pre 1970s songs. Wayne decided to sing Hey Big Spender and that was the birth of Wayne.
You can catch Fisherman Jon on 13 July at Soho Theatre and Wayne Wayneson 22-26 July at All is Joy Studios, Soho.
We saw what you did in the dark:
23/06/24. GURL CODE, The Exhibit, Wandsworth
We first saw Alex Franklin perform at Sketch Off with her powerpoint/song/epic dumpster fire performance of Gun Mouse, which was undermined by an equally hilarious back and forth with her tech, Will BF, who frantically attempted to sort the tech as Dave Hardcastle’s strict seven-minute-timer ran down.
GURL CODE is as hilarious as her Sketch Off song, though it packs a far more emotional and personal punch. The show started before the show started. Of the three event rooms in The Exhibit pub, one was occupied by a hen do, another by a mysterious group of girls SCREAMING along to “Don’t Stop Believing,” and the final by the rag-tag audience members eager to see Franklin’s WIP.
Franklin introduced herself from behind the bar and jumped on stage with a frenetic energy that she carried throughout the show, bouncing around the stage and punctuating her jokes with the occasional dab. Like her Sketch Off performance, Franklin’s show features a mix of song, stand-up, and the strangest powerpoint thought experiments we have yet encountered. Franklin us into her brilliantly strange mind by weaving stories of her childhood and her transition, while also educating the audience about her experience as a trans-woman. The ending packs a surprising punch that left our jaws open and eyes teary. She’s charming and weird and unapologetic all at the same time. We can’t help but be won over, instantly.
You can catch Gurl Code at Underbelly Cowgate everyday at 8:25 PM at Edinburgh Fringe Festival.