In a big, bright rehearsal room at Southwark’s Unicorn Theatre, Le Gateau Chocolat is giving feedback to the new cast of his revolutionary children’s production, Duckie. His fingernails, painted an iridescent shade of blue, flash in the sunlight as the cabaret star, opera singer and all-round entertainment powerhouse praises his tiny team and smiles.
First imagined in 2015 – in part to offer comfort to his young niece, who had recently moved to the UK from Nigeria and was struggling to settle in, and in part upon realising that a drag queen’s natural audience is a gaggle of excitable kids – Duckie is a radical reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling. Following acclaimed stints everywhere from London’s Southbank Centre to the Fringe World festival in Perth, Australia, Gateau is now stepping down from the lead role for its festive run at Manchester’s Home theatre. Instead, it will be shared by two young actors, both non-binary and one neurodiverse, with aspects of the part adjusted accordingly.
“We’ve been talking about how the pronouns work – does it hold their identities?” asks Gateau, who is evidently thrilled not just to be passing on a role that means so much to him, but also by the idea of taking his actors’ lives into consideration. “As opposed to a normal rehearsal process, we’re actually devising first, asking: ‘Where does this sit for you?’”
Born George Ikediashi in west London, Gateau was raised in Nigeria, where he soaked up the sounds of his parents’ diva-heavy record collection, fostering early obsessions with Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton. Returning to the UK to attend secondary school, it was another obsession – US TV shows such as Ally McBeal – that saw him apply to study law at Sussex University. By week two he was already over it: “I thought, ‘This is hell!” But he persevered until graduation. Thankfully, something of an escape route had showed itself, via a fabulous weekly disco and cabaret night in Brighton by the name of Dynamite Boogaloo. Slowly morphing from punter to performer, it wasn’t until he was in his 20s that Gateau made his drag debut, but he had been honing the art of being someone else since he was a child, hiding his queerness from his religious family.
“I’d thought: ‘What does this room need me to be?’ If I’m a jester, they won’t notice that I’m effeminate,” he says. “My drag isn’t about female impersonation, but about being chameleonic and shapeshifting in a way that’s protecting myself” Ahead of his 40th birthday next year, he feels this has morphed again, this time into something more liberating: “Today my drag isn’t about [being] something else, it’s a magnification of me.”
Le Gateau Chocolat’s unique brand of performance couldn’t be contained by the Brighton underground for long. Since his early appearances in and around the city’s cabaret scene he’s performed everywhere from Shakespeare’s Globe – where he dazzled as Feste in Twelfth Night after an audition which involved crooning Creep by Radiohead for artistic director Emma Rice in the back of a cab – to Glyndebourne. For the past decade he’s been one of the busiest names in theatre; just this year there’s been a stint at the Old Vic in Rice’s adaptation of the 1987 film Bagdad Cafe, as well as Gateau’s own directorial debut with the song cycle Liminal at the Kings Head, Islington.
Next he’ll be bringing Now That’s What We Call Musicals to Soho Theatre alongside fellow drag queen Johnny Woo, the follow-up to their raucous sing-along show, A Night at the Musicals. “I’ve always, always been a clown. The show is rooted in our friendship in a wonderful way, but is also really, really, really stupid,” explains Gateau. He’s not wrong: the original production opened with a number from The Phantom of the Opera with Gateau as Christine and Johnny as the Phantom, albeit one dressed as Darth Vader and wielding a lightsaber. “We seek to make people really happy and I think that’s always landed … Until we went to South Africa,” he says with a wince.
In 2019 Gateau and Johnny took their daft but delightful sing-song to Johannesburg and were met with a stony response. “We thought we were going on a summer holiday but what it really was, was an education,” he says. “We had completely underestimated what the implications of us standing on stage would look like.” A black and a white drag queen on stage together, singing the best of Andrew Lloyd Webber, was too much for some; Gateau recalls one man who turned his head away for the entirety of the show. “They just didn’t want it, like it or get it. Apartheid ended in 1994, which, culturally and politically speaking, is still yesterday,” Gateau says. “But I mean, Johnny and I were in bathing suits in the poster! What we were doing shouldn’t have been a surprise!”
The trip was meant to offer a little light relief after Gateau’s harrowing experience two weeks prior in Germany, where he had been involved in a production of Tannhäuser at long-running Wagnerian celebration, the Bayreuth festival. Before the opera had even began Gateau was on edge after discovering that Hitler had been a regular visitor to the venue. Proceedings took on an extra air of menace when he was booed at the first performance; Gateau later wrote of the “tremendous vitriol and racism” he had endured there.
“It was the most extraordinary thing because what I wrote went a little bit viral,” he says. “Viral enough for me to receive lots of hatred from a lot of Nazis and a lot of gaslighting from journalists who weren’t there.” He felt marooned and abandoned: “The way opera works, as soon as your opening night happens, their creative team move on. There was no support at all.”
But at home in the UK, Le Gateau Chocolat remains a powerfully positive force, not just when he’s on stage airing his graceful baritone, but when he’s skewering homophobia, misogyny, racism and male aggression on social media and engaging with those who peddle it. “I think it’s really important that I start to share these messages so that people understand I’m not a cartoon,” he says. “I engage with social issues, social justice and conversations about women’s rights, feminism, trans rights and the LGBTQ community. Because they are who I am – not because of some kind of agenda.”
Duckie is at Home, Manchester, 15 to 23 December; Now That’s What We Call Musicals is on at Soho theatre, London, 13 December to 22 January 2022.
