Finding the power within. Susie McKenna.

Susie McKenna is a fixer, in the best possible way. Amongst the dancing, acting, writing and directing, she remains passionate about one thing - the importance of storytelling and the power that comes with it. She talked to us about ALL of that and a lot more and it was great fun.

Who are you?

I’m Susie McKenna. I’m very happily married to the wonderful Sharon D Clarke. I’m lucky to still have my mum. These two people have been the focus of my world recently. I’m a writer, director, actress and currently, I’m an Associate Director at Kiln Theatre, having run Hackney Empire as Artistic Director for eight years. 

Why do you do what you do?

I didn’t really have a choice. My parents were in the business. I was lucky enough to have parents who were singers and performers. I come from a very working class family and singing was a way for my parents to get out, to leave very deprived areas of West London and dare to dream, as a couple. My Dad was pro - he was in ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) during the war, (he was a lot older than my mother) and then did work for the BBC and made some sort of living post war. When they got together, they started performing in variety and by the time I came along, variety was dying but it helped them buy their first house in the Midlands. No one in the family had been able to buy a house.

I was an only child, so my world was a very adult world - an adult world of performers and pianists. Some of the other extended family were also artists, variety artists and some of the others just loved music. My mum says I tap danced out of the womb! That had always been in me. I suppose, for my parents, it was their way out. They didn’t think about school or intellect or me going to university. It was, “You, you’re going to be a star, you’re going to be fine!” That then moved to, “Well, you’re going to drama school”. They didn’t quite understand the theatre side. They were performers, so they couldn’t understand why I would work for fifty pounds a week in theatre, when I could earn two hundred pounds a night singing. “What are you doing? You could go on a cruise, you could be a cruise ship artist!”

I guess that’s why I’m in this mad business called show. It’s because of them. It’s always been my life. I ended up not going to drama school (young and foolish) and I wish I’d gone to university. We were a working-class family, no one went to university. I didn't understand how university wouldn't heed my rise to whatever that would be. I trained to sing and dance. I realised intellectually I needed to read more, with the sort of conversations that were around me and I very quickly tried to educate myself in order to have longevity in the industry; to be able to straddle different strands I needed to up my game. It’s just always been part of my life. The thrill of entertaining people was something I inherited from my parents and that is about applause. My mum listens to recordings of my dad - she has vascular dementia now, it’s not too bad yet. It was post stroke, she had a stroke last year. Recordings have been essential, so I’ve been sending her recordings and pictures and photographs. You hear my mum and dad live on stage and all my mum does is listen to the applause at the end, to see if it was okay. “Did you hear that applause? Did you hear that?!” “I heard it Mum!”  I don’t think I had a choice.

Is it possible to get that feeling when no one is there?

I don’t think it is. Performing was for the applause. Standing outside, watching as a director, seeing things that you’d made suddenly work with an audience (particularly comedy but also with applause but laughter), as a writer, as a writer of comedy for me that was - do those laughs land? You hear that audience generate this laughter. This isn’t something you can physically experience when you’re in this situation.

I've done a few (hopefully) motivational interviews with students, with graduates and indeed just with freelancers in general. As part of Kiln Theatre, we’ve been having a few surgeries, a few things where we’ve tried to keep people motivated, keeping the tentacles out to the two hundred or so freelancers that are our family, if you like. The one thing I’ve found myself doing and thinking about is - I’d already been going through this a little bit. I was performing less over the years, particularly when I had to take over Hackney Empire. All my performing just went, apart from odd things. I was having to re-evaluate that myself, in terms of what I needed and wanted to happen in the business, what I wanted to get out of it. The one thing that got me through and to be able to help other people get through was - one type of creativity isn’t the be all and end all. Being on the West End stage isn’t the be all and end all. I say that to graduates, I say that to people who are struggling in the industry who might be out of work. The one thing that gets me through is that I have to be creative in other ways.

You have to find that outlet, even to the point where Sharon and I, if we have to end up leaving this God-awful place, this country and go and live in Spain, which is the dream anyway, we will record, we will start a choir, I will record, I will find my creativity in that way. I’ve always tried to instill in people coming into the industry that putting all your eggs in one basket is no good. That’s the same within your creativity. Creating my own work gave me power, gave me power that I didn’t even understand I needed. I’ve tried to stop myself saying that I should be writing the next novel or using this time to create a masterpiece. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s more about delving deep into your soul and finding other ways of getting that feeling. I certainly don’t think you’re going to get that feeling of a thousand people cheering and clapping you at the Hackney Empire or anywhere on the West End stage. But the idea of gratification - why you do what you do and why you have to be creative… At the end of the day we are storytellers, no matter what we do we’re storytellers and those stories are so important.

The more political I’ve got, the more important it is for me to tell stories. Now, working at Kiln, I realised that had to be my next step - to tell the right stories, the stories that are not being heard. Maybe there’s something more important than applause at this moment. This pandemic has given me time to think about it. Working for Kiln, working at Kiln has been a godsend; a lifeline to be part of a building, to be part of a family and to also have as part of my responsibility to reach out to the wider family, a link with the freelancers. The same went for Hackney. I realised that Hackney wasn’t really doing that so I reached out to as many of the Hackney family that I could. I guess the whole thing made me think why I do what I do. I realised, then, that it was inevitable that the politics (and that’s with a small p), the whole idea of why we tell stories and which stories we tell, have become very important to me.

On the other hand, there’s been a part of me that’s realised how much I really, really miss singing. And I haven’t been singing for a long time, not in that way. I’ve been thinking about why I walked away from Hackney and how I walked away from Hackney and part of that was to find that performer side of me again. I’ve just been singing and that makes me feel good. How many times do you say to choirs or people singing how much better you feel if you sing, (whether that’s with a group or not), how therapeutic singing is to your soul and how you feel? I’ve been singing more around the house than I have for ages (maybe because I’ve just been in the house) but for me, it has been a shift. This isn’t forever but this is making me feel that there is a shift somewhere, within myself or within my surroundings, where I’m working. Maybe that’s about age. 

I’ve never really had this time to reevaluate things before. Both Sharon and I realised, when the lockdown happened, that we were really happy because we haven’t seen a lot of each other. We’re ships in the night and the last two years have been crazy. It was joyous, just to stop. I’d been quite ill when I left Hackney. I was told I had total burnout and I didn’t understand what that was until it hit me. I’ve never had anxiety before in my life. It was really interesting because I thought I was totally invincible. I think, strangely enough, going through that made me stay relatively sane going through this time. I so needed to do this. I should have done this a while ago. I’d started meditating and I’d started doing all the things that Sharon’s been telling me to do for the last twenty years! I don’t blame her for the “I told you so!”, not in the slightest! I found myself quite quickly going back into that cycle of what do I do? I was lucky enough to get the job at Kiln, which was amazing and made me realise that it was what I wanted. When lockdown happened, I suddenly jumped into the idea of there must be a way that I can make things better. I’d been so used to doing that, within Hackney particularly. I found myself getting swallowed up by the Freelancers Task Force and Freelancers Make Theatre Work and. Then I found myself talking to graduates and I suddenly realised that I was right back to when I was firefighting at Hackney, right back mentally with the inside anger and frustration. I was so lucky that a) Sharon said it, but also Indhu at Kiln said it - that I needed to pull away a bit. I was heading straight back to where I was in 2017. Without a doubt, that made me pull back and protect myself a little more. I’m a fixer. And not being able to fix is really frustrating, horrendous.

When we come out of this, we should be healing. Our industry has got to be about bringing people together and that isn’t the Brexit fucking festival. We’ve got to find a way of telling the stories, of doing that.

Storytelling can take place anywhere. Just because you can’t do theatre the way you did theatre, the way you’ve been making your money, the way you have built your empire and your empire isn’t quite working, just turn your head to the side somewhere or behind you or in front of you or below you, just look out there a little bit. See what else there is. I think we do have to rethink how theatre is made, how we tell our stories, what we do, how we do it. I don’t think people realise how important storytellers are to society. Any sort of arts and creativity is about holding up a mirror to society. We are good for your health, for the nation’s and society’s health. With a government like this, you’re never going to get that thinking, so we somehow have to find a way. And it is about persuading, I suppose, the people who make money in the four walls to think outside the box and go ok, how do we do this. I’ve been trying to talk about that, I’ve lost the energy for it at the moment. It comes in spurts, having the energy to make things happen. I didn’t realise how much of my time at Hackney, (from the late 1990’s) had affected me in wanting to make things happen and finding ways. The minute you’re lucky enough to have a building that’s a semi home, it’s much easier to do that.  

What would you do if you couldn’t do what you do?

If I couldn't do anything creative? I’d go and work with orangutans. I’d go and work in an animal sanctuary. I’d work with animals basically. That would be what I’d do. I’d “fix” there too! I don’t know how I’d cope with the orangutans being up in the sky, I mean, being up high and the bugs… I’d have to get over that. I’d work with animals in some way. And yes, I’d be inevitably pulled into preservation and then entertaining them(!). Elephants love music, they really do so - yeah. Entertaining the elephants, why not?! I could go do that in Singapore or somewhere. I can see that.

What was the power you achieved that you didn’t know you needed?

I’d never been asked my opinion. I trained as a dancer which means you train as a soldier. In early dance training, your expression isn’t even there, depending on where you go. In my sort of dance, where you’re learning ballet, you’re learning tap, expression is there but I was never asked to create my own work or be expressive in that way, particularly in those days. Then, it became about getting into the industry and getting the next job. Looking at the back of the stage, finding my way into becoming an actor, reinventing myself, denying I was a singer and dancer to a director so that he’d give me a job in a straight play, which he did. (And then of course, he was casting a season and two of them were musicals so I had to go and knock on his door and say actually I can sing and dance. He just laughed in my face and said how could he look at me and the way I walk and not know I was trained to dance. I walked like a duck!) There have been hurdles but I’ve never been given the space to evaluate why I was having to break through glass ceilings, why I was ‘elbows up’, trying to fight my way through. I pitched idea of doing the pantos at Hackney and I suddenly realised that that there I was, creating something, the ideas were coming out of me and that I could give people work and casting it. The power of being a woman creating her own work and how I could shift the balance in how you tell stories and how the pantomime is told, using love as the focus of the whole idea of the stories and changing those stories so that they can exist in a twenty-first century world, where they can hold a mirror up to that world… I then realised, if you had created work, people saw you differently and suddenly saw a different side to you and suddenly your opinion was being asked of something. I’d never had that. 

I suppose that’s why I ended up directing because I was a gobby actor. It was inevitable that people didn’t want to know what I thought!  It wasn’t exactly a nice, creative place to be. In a nutshell, being asked to create and being paid to create, you could make it whatever you wanted it to be. I saw it as a way of really giving opportunity, of lifting up. There was no question for me that diversity was everything. I’d seen diversity get worse. Representation was bad enough all the way through but in the rock musicals and the things I was doing in my early twenties, it was a very mixed cast. And even working class stories on TV, Alan Bleasedale, Willie Rushton, those artists being lauded, where were they? I just thought - no, we’re going backwards. Hackney had to be representative, it would have been ridiculous not to be. By ‘power’ that’s what I meant. I could hopefully make a difference but at the same time I had a freedom to hopefully spread the love a bit. I think that’s what it was, as opposed to spreading someone else’s love. With that also comes a bit more financial stability, to be honest. If you’re getting a royalty from something you’ve written, you have more stability as an artist. If you are being able to do that then that underpins buying you time and space to do what you do, to choose your work a bit more, that stability.

Can you push diversity even more?  Do you want to?

Oh yeah. You know what? It’s impossible for a white person to talk about this, with the knowledge that I know a person of colour would have, in terms of how they’ve been treated. Everyone has a story. Sharon and I have been talking a lot recently about the “talk”, having to have that with your kids and how long is it going to be before things get better? I got a bit reactionary, when people were jumping on bandwagons with Black Lives Matter and were then calling out theatres, which needed to happen. There’s no point coming out of Covid and not changing. There is no way this can’t be about change and hopefully change for the better. We’re in a fight for our lives. When I said about state run theatre, I said it flippantly but I worry about it. I think about how theatre gets funded and how many more years we have of this government. The whole point is that there will be theatres like Kiln and there will be artists that need to fight for those stories to be out there and for things to change. It’s got to be about representation on boards, better pathways, theatres providing better pathways. That then goes into Education and how you look at creative thinking. In fifty years’ time, so many of the jobs that people do now are not going to be there. Automation is the biggest enemy, not fucking Russia. It’s inevitable automation, which has been brought forward by Covid, four or five years. For me, it’s the same fight, but we also have a chance to stand up, be anti-fascist. It’s not good enough to say that you’re not racist. The fight and the mantle have to be taken up by all of us and the first fight will probably be in the ecology of the theatre industry and holding people to account. I’m lucky that I have feet in the commercial sector and it’s really interesting the difference of opinion and action against non-action or box ticking. To be honest, there are devils on both sides, without a doubt. It’s about finding ways to make sure that things will change. It’s thrown up a lot of things about institutions or producers signing up to make change. But do they ever really walk the walk? They’re going to have to and it’s people like me that can call it out. It should be people like me because actually, It’s not just a black artist fight, for christ’s sake, that’s the point. It’s time to be more vocal.

It’s also what you do and how you do it, walking the walk. The dialogue that has happened during the lockdown, the Black Lives Matter movement remerging - it’s not new is it? These conversations are not easy to have, but they need to be had and they need to continue. It’s the same with the freelance world. Seventy-six per cent of us make theatre, make art. There’s a joy to not being tied to one place, there’s a joy to being freelance but with that comes great instability. This pandemic has shown it up. There are going to be huge pressures on this government, on boards that are outdated. They don’t understand the industry and, therefore, are nervous, unsupportive and the pressure will be that they need to play safe. Presenting a show that’s a black story or something about disability - they’ll just want happy, they’ll just want entertainment. It’s about an art form being dumbed down and this is the way you do it.  It’s all going online anyway. How do we fight that one? Where people can say I can just watch it on my sofa. For me, I’ll always be fighting it but my fight will be by producing work and telling stories, rather than diving back into the place I was at Hackney, which was political and lobbying. That exhausts me and is not conducive to being creative either. The reason I left the place I loved was that it was doing my head in, other people were doing my head in and I needed to be creative again. 

How has the journey of your art engaged your voice? Personally, artistically and/or politically?

Yes, to all three, really. Creating the Hackney Empire pantomime was the beginning of opening a whole side of me that all converged. Making theatre in a place like Hackney, that is steeped in historical politicisation, steeped in fighting the good fight - there’s no way you can create a show that can identify with that place and not find yourself being political. And I grew more political as the years went on. 2016 burst the bubble and I said ‘fuck it ‘and the next four pantomimes were very political. Once I started building politics into the story, my art, creatively, personally, I didn’t know that was in me. It was finding a power within yourself you didn’t know you had. I was told it wasn’t my place because I was working class, didn’t go to university and was a performer, so I should stay in my place. That was the power, to find the things in me that would make me change things in this industry. I will be at the table because I have to be, to make things happen. I’m not going to let that phase me.

I’ve always wanted to lift people up, that’s been a huge part of my life, especially in the last ten years or so. I’ve always worked inclusively and for diversity but are they the stories I should be telling now? Should it be this person to tell the story and then, how do I make that happen? I mean, there are some things that Sharon and I are creating together, which works well in terms of what we’re thinking of. And hopefully people will see me as a champion and I will always champion but am I the right person to direct that show? If I’m going to do that because I’ve been pulling for it since the beginning, then how do I bring someone with me on that journey, to then pass the baton on? But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to direct a show with no black people in it. I mean, what the fuck? But that’s about what story it is and whose story it is.

Who are you?

I’m obviously a fixer, as you’ve shown me. It took me a long while to say it and I only really started to say it to myself, once I started to work with younger artists about twenty years ago. I was determined to say to young kids that the minute they walked in the door, they must call themselves an artist. I found myself saying that to them because I was telling them about power and talking to them about stories. By articulating that to them, I had to be thinking about that myself and I hadn’t been. Damn it, in order to instill that into them I had to see myself like that first. So who am I now? I’m an artist, that’s who I am and I will always be - whether that’s entertaining elephants or hopefully making something with my wife, that we’re proud of. I’m incredibly blessed. I always have been. I’m not saying I haven’t fought for things but I’ve been blessed as well. I have to say that. That starts with tap dancing out of the womb from another tap dancer’s womb. That’s the first blessing.  

    Yeah, Susie was in ‘Cats’. So we HAD to include this picture…:)