‘You think you look fabulous – then you realise you’ve got knickers on your head’

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This column is called Lunch With, but to be accurate, today it’s Brunch With, in deference to actor-dancer-musician-cabaret artist Meow Meow’s hectic rehearsal schedule. She initially requested that we meet at Brunswick Street institution Mario’s, but as I recently dined with fellow cabaret legend Moira Finucane there, we’ve ended up at Alimentari, two minutes down the road.

Meow Meow – or Melissa Madden Gray on her birth certificate – has been in the cabaret game a long time, starting with Perth Festival in 2001. She performs a style of “kamikaze cabaret”, which has been described as “always one step from disaster”. But behind the slips, wardrobe malfunctions and apparent missed cues is a sharp and savvy performer – every purported misstep is, in fact, a meticulously choreographed performance, designed to get the audience laughing and, as she says, slightly terrified.

“It’s for the unexpected,” she says. “And also I can have all these grandiose aspirations, but I’m very aware of my tiny place in the universe, and so it’s struggling with that.”

Born in Canberra, she trained in classical ballet (“in the womb,” she says, “lost in the martini mists of time”) before coming to cabaret. “I like the heightened form of it,” she says. “I think it’s much more true than what we pretend to be every day. I think being heightened is true. And wearing a uniform and pretending to be small is, you know, pretending. Being heightened is honest.”

She’s performed everywhere (London, New York, Berlin, Sydney, Monte Carlo, Hollywood) and with everyone (David Bowie, the Berlin Philharmonic, Alan Cumming, Barry Humphries, Taylor Mac). She’s on the road so much that she doesn’t really have a home base – “the world is my home”. Of course that life is glamorous, but it also has a way of grounding a person.

She was performing a show at Carnegie Hall – “Carnegie Hall, listener!” she says, bending close to my recorder – when a friend convinced her to go back up to the foyer to see her sold-out show poster. “The elevators were broken, so we not only are carrying up all of my suitcases and many mannequins, as I made a fake band, I had a fake massive band on stage with me. The glamour!” She laughs. “Carrying mannequins and suitcases, and we wheel around, and the poster is down. The next one’s up.” It wasn’t the only elevator-related drama for the night, as it turned out; when she returned to her hotel she discovered her band was stuck in the lift. “We spent half the night with the fire department. It was hilarious. And then walking up the stairs in the hotel because I was too worried about the elevator, with a floppy mannequin banging on each step, thunk-thunk-thunk.”

Turkish eggs with labneh, merguez sausage, and pickled peppers and onions.

She returns to this story several times through our brunch, as it’s emblematic of the kind of performer she is – a soaring, serious musician who has played the great concert halls of the world, but who also sees the gut-busting hilarity of dragging a mannequin, corpse-like, up the stairs. “But I think I like the shock of the ridiculousness of your pants being stuck in your knickers because it’s the real things that happen. You think you look fabulous, and then you realise you’ve got a pair of knickers on your head that you used as a scrunchie. Clean knickers, but still. Then you’ve got the audience in a state of slight apprehension, dare I say, and that’s a receptive audience, slightly terrified.”

There are no knickers on her head today, with Meow looking glamorous and smart in a black velvet tuxedo jacket, her signature wild curls framing her face and her green eyes sparkling beneath fake lashes that reach halfway down her cheeks. “I made an effort!” she laughs. She is slight and extremely beautiful, laughing often, but serious, too, when she talks about art – both hers and other people’s – philosophy, the state of the planet and truly dire state of the performing arts world post-COVID. She loves Alimentari and highly recommends the tuna sandwich for a future lunch. But as this is brunch, we both go for eggs – hers Persian (wilted spinach, shanklish cheese, dukkah, sourdough), mine Turkish (labneh, pickled red onion, aleppo pepper, merguez sausage).

Life on the road for Meow Meow is glamorous – until it isn’t.

She has to catch a flight to Sydney this afternoon to prepare for the Belvoir Street season of her newest work, an interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s morality tale The Red Shoes. It’s the third in her fairytale trilogy, the first two being The Little Matchstick Girl and The Little Mermaid, also Andersen. For those who haven’t seen the 1948 film or don’t know the story, The Red Shoes is about a girl who covets a pair of exquisite red shoes and wears them to church, even though she’s told it’s inappropriate, and chooses to go dancing in them instead of attending her mother’s funeral. She’s cursed to dance forever, eventually begging the executioner to cut off her feet, which continue dancing even after they are severed.

Persian eggs with dukkah, wilted spinach and sourdough.

Sound like a rollicking good time? In Meow’s hands, it will be.

“It will be hilarious,” she says. “I can’t help it. Especially when it’s in this trilogy of fairytales that are turned on their heads. It’s completely ridiculous, and it’s lush.” But she says the show also has, at its core, real heart. “I think those concerns are always going to be buzzing around me: What can we do? Whether it’s pants on my head or singing an aria, it’s always going to be searching for that connection.”

But there will be plenty of pathos, too. Much of Meow’s work is influenced by the ideas of philosopher Walter Benjamin, who posited the idea of “the angel of history”: “This figure being blown into the future, but it’s staring back at the pile of debris that we’ve made, the mess that we’ve made. It comes into my work a lot, this notion of ‘can we do anything about it’? Can we learn from history? Can we bring it with us? Or are we sort of condemned to always just be being blown into the future while looking at disasters? And, of course, I want to find the beauties in history and the precious things and bring that learning with us.”

Meow Meow in rehearsals for The Red Shoes

Benjamin, a German Jew, was very influenced by a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, or new angel. “He got out of Berlin and took the painting with him,” says Meow. “He went to Paris in the ’30s, and he was down in the south of France, and in that group of people who were going to be given passage by America to get out, a group of intellectuals. His connection or some rules changed, and he couldn’t get out, and he committed suicide. And then the next day, the rules changed again. He did have the right papers.”

The painting is now housed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, but it happened to be on loan in Berlin when Meow was there doing a show, and she got the opportunity to see it in person. There was no one else in the room with her as she studied the painting, and she was struck by a shadow from the skylight, which reflected off the glass of the painting and onto the floor. “There was something about the blank reflection that felt so symbolic about what do you make of this painting?” she says. “Because [Benjamin] sees it as horror at the debris we’ve made. And when I look at it, I realise ... that you could also see it as a laughing child, as a mischievous thing. And I realised in my mind, I’d made it this thing of horror, shrieking at the past and really, there’s another way to see it, which is there is some hope and some mischievous, forward-moving energy.”

Benjamin wasn’t writing about the Klee portrait per se, but using it as a jumping-off point for his theory of history and progress, but standing in that room offered the other, more playful interpretation of the painting. “That’s the sort of work that I like to do, is that you’re never telling people ‘this is what it is’; you go, ‘here are some ways of thinking’, because you can’t control what people will think. So I think always within the work of being as multi-layered as I can, and why I like to, be self-heightened on the stage and off-stage is, really, to create the space for all the dreaming.”

Whether it’s knickers on her head or dancing herself to death, singing soaring Weimar Republic-era songs to a sold-out Carnegie Hall or dragging a mannequin, thunk-thunk-thunk, up hotel stairs, that is entirely Meow. She’s horrified at the pile of debris we have left behind us but also moving forward, mischievously. And always making space for all the dreaming.

Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes will play at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, October 4-November 9, at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, November 19-December 6 and at His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth from 26 February -1 March 2026 as part of Perth Festival.