Interview: Actor & writer Léa des Garets talks about her new play George and LGBTQ+ representation in theatre
09/06/2024
Léa des Garets is a queer award-winning actor, writer and theatre-maker from France. Through her company MQT Productions, Léa aims to give more visibility to hidden voices from the past and the present, focusing particularly on international voices, female-led narratives and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Here, she talks to me about George, her new play, which opens at the Omnibus Theatre later this month, playing a writer writing a play and LGBTQ+ representation in theatre. (Scroll to the end for the video)
George is inspired by the story of queer French author George Sand. How did you discover her, and what made you want to write the play?
So I am French, and George Sand is quite well known in France, but in a very limited way. Although she sold more books than Victor Hugo and Honoré Balzac in her time, she isn't nearly as well known as they are today.
At school, I had only studied two of her works, so I wasn't drawn to her literary works. But what I did know was that she dressed as a man, she used a male pen name and allegedly had many lovers.
I had this sense that she was a free woman or expressed her gender in whatever way she wanted, and she was still really, really successful in 19th-century France.
In 2019, I was really exploring my own queerness and craving for figures, not only to study but also to potentially embody as an actor, and I re-stumbled upon her.
In spite of all the press slandering, she still fought for equality and went against the norms, not only in what she represented but also in what she was saying. She really has something to say to our time, so I needed to write about her. And how amazing would it be to play her?
You play George and wrote the play, how does being the playwright inform your performance process, particularly as George in the play is a writer?
I had this image of three circles, there was my world, Léa the writer, and her world, George Sand the writer and the work that she is writing in George the play, which is her play Gabriel.
So much of the writing process of George is included in the play itself. There was a lot of bouncing off ideas with loved ones who are in the industry and who aren't, as well as brainstorming. There was some getting up in the middle of the night to write and also not commanding inspiration but having things come at you from the outside.
But then there is also the tunnel vision for something that you end up being so incredibly passionate about. I really found and experienced that, and I know what it feels like to hold on to what you believe in.
Do you think theatre is getting better at telling LGBTQ+ stories?
Yes, there's definitely more representation and will to make the LGBTQIA+ community visible nowadays. But I feel like it's more present in the fringe side of theatre—that might just be my perspective.
You have queer stories in more prominent institutions, but it is quite rare in the West End, and I think it is time for these stories to be incorporated into the mainstream narrative because they are the mainstream.
LGBTQ+ stories have always been there; they've just been kept in the dark. There's a lack of automatic representation of these narratives because we choose to follow a certain canon that doesn't represent those narratives.
Sometimes, I see exciting productions that incorporate queerness and that representation of those elements of the canons, and I think that's exciting. We're getting there, but I wish it could become more normal.
Slightly mean question now: you perform and write, if you had to choose between the two, which would it be?
My first love is acting, but a lot of what prompted me to write this play was how exciting it would be to perform her. And also, to me, performing and making theatre are one thing; you make as you go, you make as you perform.
So, although I wrote this, I wrote this play from acting; there were so many acting techniques that went into writing it, from devising to improvisation.
I would have to find something ignited through the acting to write, but then since opening that door, I have had some amazing offers coming in for writing that I hadn't thought about, where I'm just a writer. So I don't know yet; maybe I haven't been enough of just being a writer.
I'm going to take you off the stage and put you in the audience, what is your favourite type of theatre to watch?
It's a bit like music, there are so many things I like in terms of style. I love comedy, drama, classical plays, new writing and cabaret, but I think at the heart of it I want to watch something that feels important and truthful.
Even in cabaret, when it's the silliest of shows, there's always this grain of something that makes you go 'ahh', you know.
Audience-side, you feel it when you have that opening. And that does not necessarily mean what you watch has to be realistic, but it means there's something that happens when you see performers really genuinely connect and you connect with them and to me that's what theatre is about.
You connect as an actor to oneself, to one's character, and to your company, and then you invite the audience to do the same. To me, the theatre I love to watch is the theatre that manages to do that.
George is at the Omnibus Theatre from 25 June to 14 July; for more information, visit the Omnibus website. Look out for my review at the end of the month.
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