‘It broke my heart’: Paul Capsis on his mother’s dying words

Family, religion and a yearning for freedom have shaped the life of this celebrated performer.

Bullied at school for his sexuality and artistic temperament, Paul Capsis found acceptance, and his metier, in theatre in his late teens and went on to become one of Australia’s most iconoclastic talents on stage and screen – particularly acclaimed for his emotionally charged cabaret performances and uncanny vocal impersonations of greats such as Janis Joplin.

This month he returns to the stage in House of Rot, a cabaret song cycle featuring tributes and original songs inspired by Grey Gardens, the 1975 documentary portrait of eccentric outsiders, and reckoning with queer legacy and survival.

I can’t be still for long, I have to continually do something. Even with eating, I’m like, “Can I do something else at the same time?” I actually record all the dialogue or songs when I’m learning a show, and I play it again and again while I’m doing other things. Actually, my worst habit is probably doomscrolling – reading about what’s going on in the world. You can’t do anything, and so you feel frustrated, and it makes you feel sick. And then you go, “My God, I’ve wasted three hours.”

Greatest fear?Living under fascism. History teaches us how quickly we can turn as humans, and how power can be used to hurt people, to kill people, displace people – to suit a narrative of how we can have a better life, if only these people or those people weren’t here.

And for me, it’s also about freedom – the fear of not being able to live your life the way you want to live it. The first people fascists attack are usually homosexuals and trans people. It’s the same with certain religions. I grew up in a very religious family – Catholicism on my mother’s side and Greek Orthodox on my father’s – and in my teens I studied the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses for two years, and they told us, “You can’t listen to rock’n’roll, you can’t be homosexual”, all those kinds of things. Even as a teenager I remember thinking, “I’d rather be dead if I can’t listen to music.”

Growing up, my biggest fear was losing my grandmother or my mother. I used to pray for them not to ever get sick or die, or that I would go before them, because I couldn’t bear it.

It was one of the last things my mum said before she died. I’d been sitting in the hospital with her every day, and she’d been in and out of sleep, and she woke up, turned, looked at me, and said: “This f---ing life”. She didn’t say another thing. It broke my heart, and I just said, “Yeah, Mum, you’re right”. My mother had a fear of everything,