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Anna Hepburn and Cathy Tyson perform in Trumpet |
Cathy comes home to blow her trumpet
Actress Cathy Tyson is playing a woman who played a man - and the trumpet. It's coming to a school near you, she tells Tom Foot.
CATHY Tyson is best known for playing a prostitute alongside Bob Hoskins and Michael Caine in the 1986 film Mona Lisa.
She later played another prostitute in the television series Band Of Gold and has almost become typecast as the tough-talking tomboy.
In an adaptation of the award-winning novel Trumpet – based on the life of jazz pianist Billy Tipton – by Jackie Kay, she plays jazz musician Joss Moody who dresses as a man for most of her life. American Jazz pianist Billy Tipton grew up as Dorothy Tipton but lived as a man for most of her life until she died aged 74 in 1989.
Tipton refused to call a doctor when she fell ill aged 74. It was the coroner that revealed her original gender to her family.
Tipton’s life has been celebrated not for her musical talents, but because of the scale of her deception – he had been married to five women and raised several adopted children.
Researching the role in Trumpet Tyson has kissed other women for the first time and immersed herself in gay culture at festivals in Manchester and at the Drill Hall in Bloomsbury – but claims she has only just got in touch with her feminine side, aged 41.
The daughter of a Trinidadian barrister and a white social-worker, who left her hometown of Liverpool at 17 for an acting career in the capital, she is about to embark on one of the most challenging performances of her career.
Grace Barnes, artistic director of Shetland-based Skeklers Theatre Company, has adapted the story surrounding the death of Joss Moody – a fictional black Scottish jazz trumpeter – whose wife is left overwhelmed after his medical reports revealed he was in fact a woman.
The show, which opens at the Drill Hall this week, will move on to tour secondary schools in Camden, Islington and Haringey.
“Joss is most certainly a he,” Tyson says, somewhat confusingly, in her soft almost trancelike tone. “She knows exactly who he is and is not confused about sexuality.
“I used to think I was very masculine – I didn’t think I had a feminine bone in my body until I played Joss. It has been the most challenging and difficult part I have ever played.”
“Emotionally there is a massive difference between the sexes. Men are brought up to play the role of protector. They are often thought of physically and because of that they hold their own physical anxieties.
“Some of the scenes will make people uncomfortable even today,” she continues. “But working in the Drill Hall has been a real eye-opener. To see ordinary gay people live their lives, take their children to school, come to the theatre and generally do all the stuff that everybody else does is a wonderful thing.”
Since 1981, the Drill Hall has established a national and international reputation for championing the gay and lesbian aesthetic. But after playing to a more accepting crowd, Trumpet leaves the Drill Hall and embarks on a school run.
In the assembly halls of Camden’s William Ellis School, Haringey’s Fortismere and Islington’s Highbury Grove, Tyson will endeavour to show off gay and lesbian characters as positive role models in a bid to nip homophobic bullying in the bud.
She said: “I think because we have such little time and there is so much riding on the performances we are all under a lot of pressure.”
“There is a story of Sir Laurence Olivier leaving the stage in floods of tears and locking himself in his dressing room. The stage manager knocks on the door and says ‘Larry, that was sensational, what’s the problem?’ He replies ‘How am I going to do it again?’”
The scene with “Larry” has had a profound effect on Tyson who “suddenly realised every actor goes through that same emotion.”
Tyson dropped out of college at 18 to pursue acting at Liverpool’s Everyman’s Theatre. She soon won admission to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Her theatre credits include leading roles for the RSC, the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, the black theatre company Talawa and the English Shakespeare Company.
Tyson has had some experience of the empowered cross-dresser before. She has played Shakespeare’s heroine Portia from Merchant of Venice – who dresses up as a man, infiltrates the court and cleverly destroys Shylock’s legal argument.
“I was too young for the part,” says Tyson. “There are young actors who are aware of what they are doing. But when I played Portia and Cleopatra for the English Shakespeare Company I was too young.”
But unlike Shakespeare’s rather unsophisticated gender-swapping roles, Josephine’s female characteristics and anxieties are brought to the fore. Secrets and lies – not generally the foundation of most good relationships – enshroud the life and death of the jazz musician.
“Everybody should have secrets – nobody owns anybody else,” Tyson says. “Joss has principles. She chose to tell a lie and she was frightened of losing somebody. I know we are supposed to be open in relationships but what if things never come to pass?” Ignorance is bliss and the characters in the play do live out a kind of fantasy utopian existence.
“They have been together for 34 years, they have a holiday home, their own private secretary, international records – everything that every couple dream of having,” she says.
As for her own life, Tyson seems happy enough in her north London home.
She says: “Acting is number one – there is nothing like putting in a good performance – but there is a life outside the stage. All the excitement and hazards of life are part of a different act.”
Trumpet 020 7307 5060
Drill Hall June 10-17
Highbury Grove School, N5 – 20 June
William Ellis School, NW3 – 21 June
Fortismere School,
N10 – 23 June |
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