A successful theatre artist, and rising actor of stage and screen, Dickie Beau has developed a reputation over the last decade as a pioneer of playback performance, emerging from the drag tradition of lip-synching. His work is increasingly studied on contemporary theatre and performance courses in the UK and is influencing the practice of a whole new generation of performance-makers.
Dickie has received multiple awards across a range of performance disciplines, including the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, Best Alternative Performer in the London Cabaret Awards, a Jardin d’Europe Contemporary Dance Award, and Best Supporting Actor in the Off West End Theatre Awards. In 2019, his solo show Re-Member Me was nominated for a Helpmann Award – the Australian equivalent of a Tony.
As an actor, Dickie played the title role in Jordan Tannahill’s Botticelli in the Fire – a queer romp through a reimagined renaissance – at London’s Hampstead Theatre, to wide acclaim (“Botticelli is superbly played by Dickie Beau” – The Times). He played Ariel in Deborah Warner’s celebrated production of The Tempest for Salzburg Festival, and won Best Supporting Actor in the Off West End theatre awards for his performance in Sheppey at London’s Orange Tree Theatre. Feature film performances include playing Kenny Everett in Bohemian Rhapsody, Georges Wague in Colette, and Roddy McDowall in the upcoming film Chasing Chaplin.
Dickie recently worked as a consultant to Renée Zellweger and Rupert Goold on the feature film Judy, for which Zellweger won the Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. He regularly works as a consultant, artist mentor, teacher and workshop leader. He is an artist supervisor for a PhD research project at Norway’s Academy of Music in Oslo, and he is an artist advisor for the Jerwood foundation. He has developed a range of creative workshops with the UK’s Live Art Development Agency, and has delivered workshops for performance professionals in Australia, the USA and Canada, as well as throughout the UK.
Dickie studied at the University of Manchester Drama department. After graduating, he worked in film and television drama development before moving to Italy to train in physical theatre. Upon returning to London, he started performing in nightclubs and after being adopted by San Francisco’s legendary drag queens Glammamore (aka Mr David) and SupposiTori Spelling, he began cultivating his own lip sync performance work. He soon became a prominent cult figure on London’s queer performance scene and Attitude magazine celebrated him as “a star of the future”. Time Out London noted his impact on the cabaret scene by putting him on their cover for a special Cabaret issue, and his increasingly video-interactive shows began to mark him out as a notable figure crossing cultural boundaries. The Guardian commended him for “superb work, demonstrating astonishing technical competence as well as conceptual ambition” and Sight & Sound singled out his DIY video contributions to the 2011 creative documentary This is Not a Dream as the highlight of the film and “incredibly moving”. He broke out of cabaret spaces and began performing in diverse venues all over London, and beyond. His work proved to be just as at home at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club as at the BFI, and evolved from short-form vignettes to full-length theatre shows.
His work models a new way of writing for theatre and revitalises vertbatim theatre techniques, building on his own wide-ranging experience in classical acting, physical theatre, drag, and Film and TV drama development. The results defy conventional ideas of what drag performance is and can be, whilst bringing about innovative new theatre experiences, and his process of writing “digital scripts” opens up fresh approaches to writing for performance.
Dickie came to the attention of academia for the way in which his singular approach to writing for theatre was influencing a new generation of performance makers. His work, comprising the slick editing and embodiment of surprising combinations of found sound and self-generated interview footage, is now increasingly studied on contemporary theatre and performance courses in the UK, with a number of leading academics publishing their research on his contributions to the performance landscape*. He is an Associate Research Fellow both at Birkbeck Centre of Contemporary Theatre and at Queen Mary University of London.
Dickie’s work captures the hearts and imaginations of a range of audiences in all sorts of contexts because it operates at the intersections of many popular traditions, and has distinct vision, but at the same time is hard to categorise as belonging to only one world – inciting comparisons with the likes of David Lynch (“Dickie Beau’s show, Blackouts, left me feeling like I’d just watched someone exorcise a David Lynch film and found Marilyn Monroe at the other end” – Exeunt magazine). His most recent solo show, Re-Member Me, directed by regular collaborator Jan willem van den Bosch, sold out at London’s Almeida Theatre, and has successfully toured to several major international arts festivals. He is currently developing ambitious new live performance works, including the radical dance project Wikileaks the Ballet, and several television and film ideas.
Dickie’s work has been encouraged, inspired and generously supported by a great many individuals and organisations, including Duckie, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the Live Art Development Agency, the National Theatre Studio, Barbican Theatre, Lisa Lee and UnderConstruction, Chelsea Theatre, People Show Studios, Martin Sherman, Julio Maria Martino, Professor Gavin Butt, Dr. Dominic Johnson, Ben Walters, the Double R Club, Abstrakt PR and many more.
*See Hamlet: The State of Play by Catherine Silverstone (Bloomsbury, 2020); Theatres of Contagion, ed. Fintan Walsh (Bloomsbury, 2019); The Illuminated Theatre by Joe Kelleher (Routledge, 2015); A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias, ed. Angela Jones (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Header photo: Re-Member Me, courtesy of Sarah Lewis