Camille O’Sullivan bounds up the stairs of the Gate Theatre in a headscarf and hairpins, breathless and apologetic even though she is early for our meeting. Less than five minutes later, with lipstick applied, she is ready to talk — something at which she has always excelled. “I am the worst,” she admits, grinning. “I remember seeing a doctor after losing my voice and he said, ‘Well, you’re fecked because you’re Irish and you talk too much — that’s the biggest problem.’”
Off stage, the London-born, Cork-raised and half-French O’Sullivan is a conversationalist prone to tangents — at one point she drifts into an anecdote about almost closing an elevator door on Patti Smith, before hurtling into a passionate diatribe about The X Factor — while on stage she has forged a career as a chameleon. The “cabaret” tag has dogged her for years but, having worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company on her one-woman show The Rape of Lucrece, done gigs at Glastonbury and played on Later . . . with Jools Holland, and after several successful runs at the Edinburgh Festival, she has developed an aversion to the label.
“Maybe people say it because I started in Bewley’s and in the gorgeous Cobalt Cafe — venues where a lot of cabaret was happening,” she says. “And then because you’re not a singer-songwriter, and you’re theatrical, people need to give you a tag. I never put a name on it, and that allowed me to play in spiegeltents, in the Olympia or at a rock festival to 10,000 people, or in small venues to 100 people. I think if you mention ‘cabaret’ they think stockings — and you’re going, ‘Listen, I am past that now.’ I am going to perform in a rubbish bin at some stage to disprove this,” she laughs. “It’s getting easier to laugh about it now. But you do sometimes see the fellas in the front row, going, ‘This is not going to plan, here.’”
She was in rehearsals for Alan Stanford’s new production of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, a musical revue of the Belgian singer-songwriter. O’Sullivan was to appear alongside Risteárd Cooper, Rory Nolan and Stephanie McKeon. Last Wednesday, however, it emerged she would no longer be appearing after negotiations between her and the director broke down. “An agreement could not be made between them,” said the Gate.
The outcome was clearly a blow for O’Sullivan. “I need a big cyber hug today,” she told followers on Twitter.
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It had been after her first involvement in the same show, in 1994 at the age of “21 or 22”, that she realised a nascent career in architecture was in jeopardy. “I really knew it that soon, because I always felt misplaced; I had an Irish accent, a Cork personality and the look of a French person,” she says. “So when I was singing those Brel songs, suddenly it was like, this is better than therapy.
“I loved acting, but I never really understood that you could be an actor singing a song. And this was it — there was a character in every song, and it was dark, joyful, poignant, angry. That was a big liberation, because I wasn’t too bothered with being me, and I could delve into this world. I loved that Brel had this drama to him; he wasn’t like Edith Piaf, it wasn’t overdramatic and sentimental. It was discussing life, sex, death — and I suppose, like any other good theatre, it had a message, like Beckett. It was provocative and would make you think.”
She has returned to Brel over the years, drawing on it for her own shows, such as last October in Wilton’s Music Hall in London. Marc Almond has even described her as the Brel Queen. As her career in music advanced, she began incorporating material by artists such as Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and in more recent years Radiohead and Arcade Fire; putting her own dark spin on them. Even so, she says, it has taken years to find her own voice through singing the songs of other, mostly male, artists. Becoming a mother to three-year-old Lila, whose father is the Waterboys frontman Mike Scott, has coloured the way she looks at the world and performs.
“Yes, and thank God — I’m thinking about somebody else, that’s the best thing ever,” she says, smiling. “And I do think of her on stage. She is taking [me being away on tour] quite well; because her dad is a performer too. We share it quite well, in terms of travelling to different places. It’s just unfortunate that she calls it ‘boom boom’, as in, ‘My mammy does boom boom.’ You’re like, Jesus, what does that sound like? That’s worse than cabaret. But I think it’s important as a performer to measure where you are in your life, because it’s your life that you’re representing on stage.”
Despite various successes abroad — and perhaps her more prominent profile on the scene — she says a move to the UK has never been on the cards.
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“It’s easier in England for me than here, but I think that of all Irish artists, unless you really hit the big time,” she says. “I won’t move there because my daughter’s father is here, my partner is here, as are all my best friends from architecture. I like walking down Grafton Street and seeing people I know. I’m also a DIY queen who likes going to Woodie’s in my boiler suit.”
Negotiating a relationship when you have a partner, the actor Aidan Gillen, who is also in the public eye but is similarly private can be tricky, she agrees. “It’s funny walking down the street with him. He gets stopped a lot and is always gracious about it. He’s delighted to meet people, and I enjoy it because to most people I’m just the camera-holder,” she says, laughing.
Having ticked off the “TV acting” box last year with a role as Countess Markievicz in Rebellion, she would like to combine more “straight” acting roles with the ongoing musical career. A new album, the follow-up to Changeling (2012), is on the distant horizon at “some point”, and she would like eventually to write her own songs. “I’ve talked about it for probably 20 years, and it’s still on my ‘to-do’ list: ‘Buy milk. Write songs’,” she grins. “I think if I had the courage, my big dream would be contacting someone such as Nick Cave or Tom Waits, asking, ‘Could you write us a song?’ Or work with someone amazing like the director of Complicite theatre company. Collaborating with people and just constantly pushing yourself — that’s the thing.”
With another UK tour planned for March, and a collaboration with Landmark Productions and Conall Morrison further down the line, this year still looks busy, despite the Gate cancellation.
“I remember my sister said, when I first did the Brel thing and gave up work, ‘But what are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t care, as long as I can sing this stuff,’” she recalls.
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“I imagined a life full of heartache, no money and singing in Bewley’s forever, but I thought, ‘If I can just keep on singing this . . . ’”
Perhaps she will.