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Drag, theatre, pop songs and musicals blend in a one-woman drag show that explores the struggles of a 18-year-old girl, trying to reconcile her Jewish and queer identities.
Written by Isla van Tricht and performed by Guy Woolf, ‘Becoming Electra: A Queer Mitzvah’ will be taking to the Arts Centre stage tonight at 20:00.
The one-woman drag show explores the origin story of Guy’s Jewish, queer, drag alter ego Electra Cute, best known as one-fifth of critically acclaimed pop super-group DENIM.
Video: Guy Woolf and Isla van Tricht discuss 'Becoming Electra'.
The band started over seven years ago while Guy was at Cambridge. “There was no queer night, there was nothing LGBTQ+, so my friend Amrou Al-Kadhi, who is a great drag queen (known as Glamrou La Denim) and novelist now as well, set up DENIM which is five queens.
"We are all very good friends and we sang pop songs and weaved it together under a kind of narrative."
While Guy says he had never considered joining the drag scene, it was Amrou’s words that inspired him to. “Amrou sort of described it as, ‘you are playing a different species, it’s really like exploring this other,’ which really appealed to me.
Pictured: Electra (in the centre) with her bandmates from DENIM, Glamrou, Chrystal, Shirley and Aphrodite.
"I find traditional theatre can be very limiting and as a performer I love to try and embody someone that looks so different to you, feels so different to you and that was really, really exciting.”
Over the seven years that Guy has spent with Electra, he has seen her develop and he knows her better than anyone else. “What happens with your drag character is they live with you, so they’re like your daemon in a Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ kind of way.
Pictured: Guy Woolf has been performing as Electra for over seven years. (Harry Elletson)
"I think the closest you can get to that is if you are in EastEnders for 30 years!” he said. “Electra has been on this journey with me. I know how she would react to things in my life. It’s a form of therapy as well, if bad things happen you can just put them on her.
"I kind of think everyone should do drag at some point in their life, it’s very empowering and also nerve-wracking!”
When playwright Isla spotted a call out for shows about the intersection of queer and Jewish identities from London’s Jewish Cultural Centre (JW3), she immediately contacted Guy and suggested writing an “origin story” about Electra.
Pictured: Guy Woolf and Isla van Tricht created 'Becoming Electra' together.
Their pitch was accepted and ‘Becoming Electra’ premiered just over a year ago in London at JW3. “It went really well,” Isla said. “It was kind of exciting and a bit of a surprise because it was just originally something quite fun for us to do and then we went from there, did three shows at the beginning of this year and now we are on tour.”
‘Becoming Electra’ is set on the eve of Electra’s 18th birthday. It explores her struggles to reconcile the different elements of her identity. “She is trying to articulate who she is,” Guy explained.
Pictured: Guy says Electra has a big heart and is very brave. (Harry Elletson)
“She has got these apparently conflicting parts of her identity that she is trying to make sense of and through the show she kind of struggles to do that. She struggles with her language and how she can convey that, which is why the play goes into song because that’s a language that she can access more easily.
“I think she’s got a big heart, she is very brave and I don’t know that she necessarily knows it but she is really funny as well.”
“I think it’s surprisingly empowering, it’s great fun, emotional,” Isla adds about the show. “It’s heart-warming and heart wrenching and very unique in the way that it blends different styles of theatre.
Pictured: Electra struggles with "seemingly conflicting" parts of her identity. (Harry Elletson)
"I haven’t seen anything else that does exactly what the show does in terms of the way it uses drag, musical, theatre, pop songs and a narrative play that you really invest emotionally into.
“You are moved back and forth as she is moved back and forth between really funny, laugh-out-loud moments, very difficult moments and moments that are really moving.”
Having been on the drag scene for over seven years, Guy has seen it changed “massively”. One of his first agents actually told him to “hide the drag thing” but Guy refused to heed the advice.
Pictured: Drag, theatre, pop songs and musicals blend in the one-woman drag show. (Harry Elletson)
“There is still this perception that drag is somehow lesser, when actually I just know that it isn’t,” Guy explained. “Having performed in musicals, Shakespeare and drag, drag is the most complex and all-encompassing performance. You are a costume designer, make-up artist, make up designer, singer, actor, comedian, it is so exhausting.”
Thankfully, shows like Ru Paul’s Drag Race, which recently premiered in the UK after several successful runs in the US, have brought drag into the mainstream much more and “kind of given it the credit that it should have,” Guy said.
Pictured: As a grad performer, Guy has to be a "costume designer, make-up artist, make up designer, singer, actor and comedian." (Harry Elletson)
“The queens on Ru Paul are extraordinarily talented, they are brilliant, it’s really entertaining, it does the job, it’s brilliant TV and I really respect them and applaud them,” Guy said.
“But I think the idea of the Ru Paul competition is quite limiting in terms of what drag is. There is this kind of that paradigm of drag that you are supposed to be measured against when actually, particularly in the UK, drag is a really diverse scene.
“Ru Paul presents men looking like women, which is fine but that’s not what this show is about and it doesn’t convey the breadth of drag performance.”
(Pic credit: Harry Elletson)
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