Singer, performer and screenwriter/ film maker Sarah McGuinness spoke to David Hennessy ahead of her autobiographical show Grit, Glitter and Gaslight- The Sarah McGuinness Story coming back to London at the Circle & Star Hampstead.
Following a critically acclaimed run at the Etcetera Theatre in 2024, The Sarah McGuinness Story – Grit Glitter and Gaslight…A Cabaret Musical, returns to the London stage, opening at Circle and Star Theatre, Hampstead in March for a limited three-week run.
Emmy nominated Sarah McGuinness transformed her behind-the-scenes life with the stars into a powerful and poignant one-woman musical cabaret, first performed at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2024 before transferring to London.
But since that first iteration it has developed into much more than a cabaret but her story of identity and survival.
Born in London, Sarah moved to Derry as a small child right as the Troubles took hold.
This musical stage show is a journey through her life in showbusiness, from her childhood on the Irish border in Derry, through a complex relationship with her roots and family dysfunction, to the heights of international success as her life becomes entwined with entertainment icons.
In 2010 Sarah was Emmy nominated for her documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story.
She then directed the BAFTA shortlisted Noma: Forgiving Apartheid about the actress Noma Dumezweni.
Blending live performance, storytelling and song, Sarah now turns the lens on herself, delving into long-forgotten memories that are both traumatic and hilarious.
Sarah McGuinness told The Irish World: “I’ve been trying my whole life to tell this story.
“Most actors you know would do this in their 20s, I’m doing it at my age and I think it’s because when you have all the stuff we grew up with, we all have a degree of PTSD to a greater or lesser extent and it does affect your whole life which is why, of course, it’s become relevant now.
“When I first did the show in August of ‘24 it was all the songs I loved as I grew up all the way to the present day.
“It was a cabaret.
“What happened was after the Edinburgh run, I then did a London run and it developed and developed.
“All I wanted to do was the singing and the rest was just in between stuff.
“What I couldn’t believe was people actually found my story interesting which honest to God, I still struggle to believe it.
“But now with everything that’s happening in the world, I’m starting to see why that is.
“What happened in the London run is you develop and you improvise and things start coming out, memories start unlocking so the show would change every night and it started to be that people would come up afterwards and they’d be in tears.
“They’d be going, ‘Oh my God, that’s my story’.
“And I’d be like, ‘Really?’
“I was completely amazed.
“It was just a framework so I could do a bunch of my favourite songs from throughout my life.
“That was it.
“It was a cabaret.
“And now at the end of that, it became something much more than that.
“I’ve got a director working on it with me now so what we’ve pulled out is this theatrical story.
“It’s actually an examination of what happens to a young kid when they’re transplanted and what happens to them all the way through their life.
“What is so weird is how many people are finding that something they could relate to.
“Honestly it was not on my bingo card.
“I’m so shocked by anybody else feeling like that.
“People have said it’s helped them and so I felt like, ‘Right, I have to carry on doing this and make it a proper theatre show’.
“When I was little, we moved to Northern Ireland right as the Troubles were blowing up all around with no idea that that was going to happen.
“My mum was from Derry and my dad was from London.
“He fell in love with her and thought it would be beautiful to go there.
“They were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this wonderful thing’.
“They were very sweet, very naive.
“When I look back at it, the show has really helped me to understand what the hell happened.
“And then we got stuck there, like lots of people: No money, couldn’t get out.
“And, of course, there I was this little kid with an English accent.
“You can imagine how well that went down.
“I was always left out of all the things and I would love to have joined in with all the Irish stuff.
“I was always considered this ‘other’ person.
“I was bullied unbelievably.
“So the whole show is my journey through running away from it all, going all around the world, trying to make a success of my life and then eventually something happens and there is the lovely moment in the show where I suddenly start to be able, for the first time in my life, join up all my history and all my aunts and uncles and all the rest of it and then suddenly I find a way back into Ireland.
“It’s all about me being able to embrace my Irish heritage and all the crap that happens along the way and the final reunification with everything.
“It’s a lovely story.
“I never thought of it in that way until we started developing it but it’s been a lovely journey.”
Your relationship with Ireland has been difficult, hasn’t it?
“It has but I’m seeing it now happening all around me, all over the world.
“In between (the songs) it’s like the story kept popping out and people kept going, ‘Oh, I want to hear more about that’.
“And then I went, ‘Oh, okay. I’ll explain that a bit more’.
“And gradually what happened was, whether I liked it or not, because I really didn’t like, the story was pulled out of me.
“And honestly it’s been a very therapeutic journey too, like trying to piece together what happened on Bloody Sunday.
“When you’re too little to understand what the hell is going on, you don’t understand anything.
“You’re trying to work it all out and the effect it has on you growing up.
“And also right now in the present day, I’m seeing little kids saying things that I said when I was a little kid: The same questions always about why.
“Dividing people is something I’m so against and it’s such an easy trick to pull and what happens is then everybody reverts to being a child going ‘you’re that’ even though you’re not but that’s an easy black and white way of seeing the world.
“And I think this show now, for me, feels like a way of showing people, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t bully. Don’t otherise because look at the damage it does to somebody throughout their entire life’.
“Most people like me don’t come out the other end.
“I’m just very determined so eventually I’ve come out the other end and I’m now able to tell it.
“But most people just stay quiet.
“Ultimately they just give up.
“They stay on the sidelines.
“And I was kind of doing it in plain sight.
“I was hiding myself behind the superficial stuff and now suddenly I’m going, ‘This is the truth’.
“It’s so freeing and what is lovely is that you can see that it means something to other people and it makes them go, ‘I never thought of things in that way’.
“The people who get it viscerally are the ones who’ve experienced something similar, some form of bullying and especially when you’re a little kid, it predisposes you to continue in that way maybe your whole life.
“And then eventually I turned the corner and this all really did happen in real life just in the last few years so you’re kind of seeing in real time the development of what happened to me.
“I couldn’t reach that authentic self because I didn’t know who I was.
“I got hammered for having an English accent and I was only a little kid and adults were cruel, and kids were cruel for years.
“And then, of course, I go back to university, back to London and then suddenly I’m considered to be Irish and I’m going, ‘But I’ve been completely excluded. I thought I was coming home, somewhere I was going to belong’.
“I think that’s the experience of an awful lot of people in all sorts of different cultures.
“All cultures have that, the people who know that feeling and they react when they see it.
“I feel like I’ve tried to be really honest so that it can be of help to people but also because it makes it a much, much better, more layered piece of work.
“When you don’t know what your identity is, you can’t be confident in anything or you adopt a kind of pretend face to try to move forward, but I think people know when it’s not authentic.
“If you have the benefit of a very stable environment, you know what you are.
“That leaves you much stronger but when you don’t know what you are, you have basically a long, ongoing identity crisis so you’re wobbling all the time and what this show has done is not only helped me to kind of finally nail all of that but to describe it and in a way that people can really relate to.
“It’s been such an incredible experience.
“Really, really phenomenal.
“I’m very privileged to have had the opportunity to make this thing what it now is and I can’t wait to show it to people.
“I know it’s good and it’s important at a time when so many people are now being othorised and divided.
“I just see the same scenario all over again.
“We need to view people differently. Big ask of course.”
You have made documentaries about other figures, what has it been like to take that approach to your own story?
“I actually make a comment about that in the show.
“I think all of it, and I wonder now if all documentary makers are not a little bit the same, they’re actually sort of examining themselves while they’re examining the subject.
“The last one I did was about Noma, about her identity crisis coming from South Africa to England in the 70s so we had a lot of common.
“And about Eddie Izzard.
“It’s about his identity.
“They’re actually all about identity, thinking about it now.
“So now this is the third of the trilogy, happens to be me by accident, not design.
“It all happened by accident.”
Where did the name Grit, Glitter and Gaslight come from?
“The grit is the grit to keep bloody going and not give up or jump off a bridge.
“Then the glitter is because I was absolutely obsessed by it as everything was getting destroyed all around me.
“Everything lovely was being destroyed by bombs.
“They (pots of glitter) were like a lifeline to something pretty that was outside all of this.
“It becomes a representation, a symbol of something beautiful in the middle of all the horror.
“Gaslight is because it predisposes you to being bullied in later life.
“There is a major story that affected years of my life where I was gaslit by somebody for a number of years and it actually brought everything to a complete stop.
“It took me many years to get over what was done to me.
“But that’s what happens when the kind of kid bullying thing that goes on is unchecked, when the adults don’t know what to do about it or when to say enough.
“They’re just descriptions of the three things that are discussed throughout the entire narrative.”
That’s the title now but didn’t you want to call it Grit, Glitter and Gobshites at one time?
“Well It was called that during its first incarnation as a cabaret because it was just snappy.
“It fitted but as the show developed with the whole gaslighting story, the ‘gobshite’ no longer felt like it was appropriate.”
Do stars who you came into contact with in your career come into the show?
“I could drop a million names.
“I won’t do it.
“I think there was a misunderstanding that it would be like that kind of a cabaret, ‘This person did this’ which I think is awfully self-defeating.
“If you’re to tell a story, tell a story. Don’t do it by taking down other people that are more successful than you. That just seems really a bit sh*t.
“So the people I’ve named, some of them well known, some of them not but they are people who were there at crossroads in my life on the journey.
“The triumph, ultimately, is the dramatic journey from that being angry and working through all these different things and trying to find my identity.
“And then eventually coming out the other side, something happens, another magical moment.
“I was able to finally go back to Ireland.
“I’d never sung an Irish song because these were really all the things that I was excluded from.
“I was unwelcome so I could never find a way.
“No matter what I did, I was always on the outside.
“Now all of a sudden I went, ‘Now I’ll take it on my terms’.
“Now it is wonderful because it really happens.
“The reason it’s relevant now is because everyone does it everywhere and it’s happening all over the world right now.
“The analogies are everywhere right now.
“That’s why it feels like it has a resonance right now that it didn’t have in 2024.”
How young were you when you moved to Derry from London?
“I was little.
“I was very little and I remember finding it absolutely beautiful and magical.
“And then overnight everything just blew up all around us.
“What was really interesting is you asked about the other documentary, the Noma documentary when she escaped with her mum from South Africa, mum and her sister.
“I did an interview with her mother and what was so interesting was her mother was there for the rolling tanks destroying everything.
“There was this piece in the interview where her mum said she remembers the tanks rolling in and mowing over the homes, these round houses with the straw roofs.
“She remembered being a little kid like I was seeing it happen and it has a profound impact on you when you see something so idyllic turned into something horrific.
“You’re too little to understand what you’re seeing and you have absolutely no power in the world at all but you just know everything has changed ultimately.
“It’s a fun show to watch but there are little bits that are kind of tough but the journey, I hope and believe, is worth it because it pays off on several levels.”
How do you feel about your Irish identity now?
“I’m completely resolved now.
“It’s fine.
“That’s why I ended up taking my mum’s surname as a stage name, McGuinness.
“The McGuinness thing was everything I ever felt excluded from.
“We had quite an English name which really didn’t help and it really marked us out but especially me, having come from London.”
It was after your mother’s passing that you went on this journey, are there moments in the show difficult for that reason?
“There are moments especially towards the end where I become the characters.
“Now I’m actually inhabiting each of these characters and they’re talking to each other so sometimes, if it’s a relative, they come into my body almost when I’m playing them.
“It gets very real sometimes.
“It’s almost like they come into me and that can be kind of emotional.
“It doesn’t happen every time but when it happens, it’s a bit weird.
“It can be a little overwhelming to have to manage that in the performances but mostly, it’s doing honour to these people and really finally understanding where they were coming from and why people do what they do.
“A journey towards self-acceptance is what the show is really.”
Grit, Glitter and Gaslight- The Sarah McGuinness Story is at Circle and Star Hampstead 3- 21 March. For booking and more information, click here.
For more information about Sarah, click here.
