Jonny Woo prepares for the East London Lecture (photo Peter Fingleton)
Jonny Woo moved to east London in 1995 and has been at the vanguard of underground nightlife in the capital for well over a decade.
Woo has set the pace and tone of the alt-drag perf-art scene with his parties at the George & Dragon, his pioneering shows at Bistrotheque, his notorious Gay Bingo and Glastonbury rampages, and his triumphant creation of The Glory, one of the city’s few recent queer-venue success stories. He’s currently working with the National Theatre and Hackney Empire.
And now, he says, he can’t afford to live in east London so he’s moving to Margate.
“I think I’m typical of quite a lot of people.” Woo tells me. “I’m an example of someone who’s come into the area, made a life for myself and, I think, contributed a lot to the area as well. And because of what’s happening regarding property prices, I’m now being forced to leave to get a bit of security for myself.”
In other words, even being a partner in a successful boozer isn’t enough to let Woo live in the neighbourhood.
He is an unusually high-profile casualty of London’s soaring housing market but far from the only one. Many hugely creative people on the performance scene – established names with strong track records as well as up-and-comers – simply can’t afford the rent in a city increasingly dominated by large-scale luxury developments.
“Gentrification is not the word,” Woo says. “Gentrification is [when] an area gets done up a bit and you get economic migration. We are seeing complete redevelopment of this area. Go up Old Street, down Hackney Road, up Mare Street, all around that area,” he suggests, and you’ll see plenty of options to buy million-pound flats but nowhere for those on middle or low incomes.
“It’s this new phase of purposeful, planned redevelopment. I’m annoyed about it. I have a lot of resentment about it. I’m angry about it.”
The squeeze is real even if Woo – who partied plenty before becoming sober two years ago – doesn’t claim to have led the kind of life bank managers smile on. But the people who carve out seminal new paths of underground expression aren’t generally known for their financial prudence.
“I’m part of a big section of my generation who squandered their money, who ran around, who didn’t put down roots. Now, with a clean head, [I’m] thinking, ‘Shit. Spunked money up the wall. What do I do? Do I give someone £1000 a month to pay for their second buy-to-let and feel resentful about it or do I just remove myself from the equation?’
“I’ve got to remove myself from the equation. Go somewhere where I can get my living expenses right down so I’ve got a fighting chance of actually saving some money up to buy a house in London – maybe with a friend, that’s the reality. So that’s why I’m moving to Margate. I’ve got some friends down there. I’ve got a bit of a connection to it from when I was a kid as well. [Woo was born in London but grew up in the Medway Towns, halfway between Margate and the capital.] So I thought I’d give it a go.”
Woo will relocate at the beginning of May. But he won’t be leaving the capital’s performance scene behind. “London to me now is a place of work,” he says. He’ll still be on duty at the Glory every weekend and has numerous other projects coming up.
First of these, and all too relevant to his current situation, is the East London Lecture, which starts a 10-night run at Shoreditch Town Hall on Wednesday April 20.
Jonny Woo in the East London Lecture
The East London Lecture is an ambitious piece of solo verbatim theatre that anatomises the past 20 years of east London cool through material gathered in interviews with a variety of locals. It has a bold opening proposition: “In 1995, in a pub called the Bricklayers Arms in Shoreditch, the world began.”
Woo inhabits figures ranging from Jim, a longstanding resident who remembers the Krays, up to Ted, a recent arrival attracted by the area’s new reputation. At the heart of the story are those who helped shape the scene that Woo fell into and in love with – people like Bricklayers Arms owner Vicki Pengilley, Bistrotheque founders Pablo Flack and David Waddington, and DJ and stylist Fee Doran. Woo brings each distinctively to life with the warm yet canny eye of an old friend.
The show is more nuanced than that “world began” line suggests. It knows that there was plenty of life in the area before the cool kids moved in, and it doesn’t smirk at those dismissed by others as hipster arrivistes. It doesn’t rail against gentrification but recognises that cities change in good and bad ways all the time. But it also insists that what happened in Shoreditch in the summer of 1995 – astroturfed pubs, cheap flats, batshit parties and all – was pretty special.
“The show is about how I love that moment,” Woo says. “I think it was a moment in London’s history that maybe hadn’t been seen in 50 years. It had an underground element but it wasn’t a political scene. But it was definitely one of creativity and freedom and had a tangible vibrancy to it – an energy to it – that people from outside the area latched onto. I think the party scene around the Bricklayers Arms kick-started what was going to happen over the next 15 or 20 years.
“Shoreditch became a fashionable destination from that point and its legacy did last a long time. To define the kind of music people are listening to, to define the way people are behaving, to define the way people are living, to define the way people are dressing – that was a big chunk of time.”
This will be the third iteration of the East London Lecture, and much has changed during the life of the show itself. In June 2012, an embryonic version was mounted at Bistrotheque, the venue off Cambridge Heath Road whose black-box cabaret room had been the cradle of the alt-drag revolution and Woo’s creative home for eight years. Earlier in 2012, the room had been demolished as part of a revamp. Woo’s Lecture took place in its supposed replacement space, a private dining room as bright and slick as the cabaret room had been dark and tatty. The show was billed as inaugurating a regular public performance programme that has yet to materialise.
A second, more sophisticated version of the Lecture played at the Rose Lipman Building in De Beauvoir Town in 2014, under the direction of Doug Rintoul. And now, furnished with original music by Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer The Opera, Made in Dagenham, Merrie Hell with David Hoyle), a set by Tony Hornecker (The Pale Blue Door, Beautiful Freaks) and a more immersive, engaged performance style, it moves to the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall.
Today, Woo says, 1995 seems significantly further away than it did in 2012. “It already feels more historic. The memory of that moment feels more distant. When I first did [the Lecture], I just wanted to mark that moment – I felt like it was a moment in time that had got lost. What’s happening now is different. East London has changed.”
This change seems to have two main elements. One is the high-end property development already mentioned above. “It’s a citywide thing and it probably goes back to the Mayor’s office,” Woo says. He mentions a new site he’s just seen called Monohaus. “That just sums it up! ‘Mono’ immediately says to me monoculture. ‘Haus’ says to me pretentious. You are building boxes out of concrete that you’re going to sell for three quarters of a million pounds. This is happening across London, across the world. It doesn’t seem accidental.”
The other element of change is a more organic, street-level kind of gentrification – the way experimentation and self-expression give way to conformity and branding. This is something Woo observes with alienation rather than anger.
“The markers of what was the idea of Shoreditch became commodified and extracted and reproduced,” he says. “The warehouse style, the stripped concrete – that was what it was because it was what it was. You lived in a warehouse. You had a bare light bulb because you didn’t have a lampshade. Now a bare light bulb is an interior design choice. It’s sold as a middle-class aspirational style. I think it’s weird [but] I’m not going to argue against it. I think it’s part of life.”
Still, he insists, he hasn’t fallen out of love with the place. “The area’s still really interesting, don’t get me wrong. East London is pretty special in its queer presence.”
Woo continues to play a leading role in that. At the end of 2014, he opened pub and cabaret venue the Glory in partnership with Colin Rothbart, John Sizzle and Zoe Argiros. It’s one of the few new additions to a London LGBTQ scene that has grown accustomed to closures, and has become an instant classic. Woo is proud that it offers more than a passive consumer experience.
“I get a huge amount of joy from seeing people gravitate towards our space and use it and flourish and be excited about being in an environment where it doesn’t feel like you’re being sold something,” he says. “When you come into it, you are contributing to it.”
Woo singles out other east London outfits such as Dalston Superstore, East Bloc, and Sink the Pink for continuing to push the boundaries of queer nightlife. “We are competitors but we are connected,” he says. “And we’re all independent businesses doing our best to make exciting, fun things, which I don’t think you get in other parts of London.”
Jonny Woo in the East London Sessions Players’ production of Suddenly Last Summer at the Glory (image Holly Revell)
Alongside its cabaret programme, the Glory is also home to experimental theatre company the East London Session Players. Woo is a core member, playing Violet Venable in their striking take on Suddenly Last Summer and holding the stage singlehanded in their ambitious and compelling multimedia update of The Tell-Tale Heart.
Last year, Woo also acted in Hellscreen at the Vault Festival and as Lou Reed in Transformer, a live version of the seminal album that he took to the Edinburgh Fringe with a full live band. There’s been drag too but it seems to have taken a bit of a back seat.
“My relationship to what kind of drag things I do is different now,” Woo says. “I tend not to solicit so much of that. I don’t really enjoy it so much any more. I’m really enjoying supporting the artists coming up [at the Glory], trying to push people and impart my knowledge about how you work on a show, what to bring to a festival. The drag side which defined me for such a long time is a much smaller part of what I do now.”
Still, what’s in the works sounds tantalising. For one thing, there’s a takeover of the National Theatre’s River Stage on the last weekend of July. “The Glory is doing a three-day residency, taking all of our madness and sticking it on the South Bank,” Woo says. “I’m going to be doing a family show based on all the stuff I used to do – the stories, the tongue twisters. I’m going to work with my friends’ kids. I’ll build that in Margate.”
There’s also an Unroyal Variety Show at the Hackney Empire on November 4 with stellar acts such as David Hoyle, Gateau Chocolat, Bourgeois & Maurice, Myra Dubois, Diane Chorley and Richard Thomas.
After our interview, Jonny drops me a line, worried that he sounded too downbeat. “I suppose feeling that my only option now is to leave London does come with a lot of regret and sadness at having to leave somewhere which became such a big part of my identity, so it’s easier to concentrate on the negative side of things as it makes leaving so much easier.”
That someone like Jonny Woo can make such a huge contribution to the vitality, beauty and spirit of our city and then find he can’t afford to live in it with hope for the future… It stinks. He said something else in our interview that resonates with the East London Lecture, his own life and the lives of many others.
“I’ve lived here now for 20 years. At what point are we allowed to say this is our home?”
The East London Lecture runs at Shoreditch Town Hall from April 20-30. Full details here.
