The last time rising Scots comedy star Susie McCabe played Aberdeen she was staring out at a sea of 10,000 faces from the stage of P&J Live for four nights– this time she’ll be a bit more up close and personal in the Tivoli.
But the award-winning comedian – lauded by the likes of Kevin Bridges and Frankie Boyle – loves both experiences, be it an arena the size of an aircraft hangar or an intimate theatre.
“But in places like the Tivoli, you can touch your front row, they’re just there,” said the Glasgow-based stand-up.
The other difference is that next week it will be Susie’s own name on the front of the Tivoli, as opposed to her last gig when she was supporting Kevin Bridges in a show that became P&J Live’s biggest selling act to date.
“It was an amazing experience, really great. It’s a very different thing playing a room like that. It also means your name is not on the door, nobody is there to see you, so you need to go out and win them over,” said Susie.
‘It’s a once in a lifetime thing’
“You’ve not shifted those tickets, Kevin has, but you get the opportunity to be platformed in front of thousands of people and you need to and take that amazing opportunity, it’s a once in a lifetime thing.”
Now Susie is coming back to Aberdeen in her own right and looking forward to a more personal style of performance.
“In those older theatres, like the Tivoli, the acoustics are perfect and the stage is perfect for you. You can use the space and by physical and it’s intimate. There’s more of a connection,” said Susie, who has a slew of comedy awards under her belt.
And Susie is hoping to connect with the Tivoli audience on Thursday May 25 in her new show, Femme Fatality, which she is touring ahead of a run at the Edinburgh Fringe. It plays perfectly to her storytelling, observational, deeply personal and very funny sense of humour, with “loads of gags”.
“This is a show where there is a 43-year-old woman standing on stage and basically saying from the day I was born, I have been failing as a woman,” said Susie.
Life before comedy
The first half is a scamper from her childhood through to the day she came out, always knowing she was different.
“Not just realising I was gay but because when I looked at TV in the 80s, every woman looked and sounded like Princess Diana. I didn’t see women on TV who even looked like me,” she said.
The second part sees Susie talk about the feedback because of the way she looks, as well as life before comedy as an electrical estimator working on building sites and premises around Scotland – including the Granite City.
“Everybody these days talks about toxic masculinity, but it was a bit of a laugh, so I put it into perspective about what that was like,” said Susie. “For the first three months they called me son. One guy called me Stevie. He still calls me Stevie.”
Susie admits writing the new show was a rollercoaster experience starting from an initial idea, through spending six months hating it, to thinking it’s going to work before arriving at the point where she is now… loving the show.
“What I love most is I’m talking about being a gay woman, who has failed at being a woman, and there are men in their 50s crying with laughter. You’re talking about building sites and you can see them nodding and going: ‘Aye, a guy eating a cherry yoghurt would get called Liberace on a building site’.”
‘I like the element of success I have’
But does Susie ever want to be the one shifting 10,000 tickets at P&J Live?
“You can only ever have one Elvis, one Beatles, one Rolling Stones, otherwise the world would explode. But sometimes if some says to you, do you want to be The Kinks, you say: ‘Aye, I’d quite like to be The Kinks’.
“If the opportunity came, would you do it? Maybe once. But maybe I don’t want that, maybe I don’t want that level of fame either where you can’t walk down the street without someone trying to take your photo when you’ve got hair like a burst couch and your manky old trainers on and you look like you slept in a bin.
“I like the element of success I have… if anything happens over and above that, that’s a bonus.”
Susie McCabe’s Femme Fatality is at The Tivoli on Thursday May 25. For information and tickets visit aberdeenperformingarts.com or call 01224 592755.
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