Amber Charlie Conroy told David Hennessy about her new play Gogo Boots Go that is about to play at Edinburgh Fringe and looks to tackle tropes about gay characters and same sex relationships in media.
Gogo Boots Go is a new play enjoying its world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Written by Amber Charlie Conroy from Dun Laoghire and Rosalie Roger- Lacan, it is described as ‘a poignant and heartfelt exploration of sexuality, shame and the power of female friendship.
This will be the third time Amber and Rosalie, who have both just graduated from University of Bristol, have taken a play to Edinburgh.
The Scotsman said of the previous 1 Tent, 4 Girls: “They have nailed the foibles and insecurities of millennial twentysomethings with absolute precision.”
Gogo Boots Go is a play that delves into themes like childhood, queerness, womanhood and religion.
It is inspired by its co-writers and performers’ experiences of growing up in Catholic cultures and the intense bond in friendship they share with each other.
The story centres around two women who meet in Charlie’s bridal shop and instantly build a rapport as they search for Clelia’s perfect wedding dress, there is a familiarity that defies logic leading to the realisation that they have crossed paths before.
We caught up with co- writer Amber Charlie Conroy who also plays the role of Charlie.
What inspired the play? “We (Rosalie and I)’ve now been making work together for three years.
“I think we have a really amazing friendship and relationship.
“We work together.
“We’ve lived together.
“We’ve been best friends since we were 16.
“It’s been a very intense and brilliant collaboration for a long time and I think the friendship is at the core of that.
“We were at Fringe (last year) and the show was going really well and we were just talking about what we might do next, what we wanted to do, how we wanted to do it and it sort of just snowballed into being like, ‘We have to make a show for ourselves and for each other’.
“I think we’ve got a really amazing intense connection and so many feelings.
“We just talk for both our countries respectively, I would say.
“There’s so many thoughts and ideas and stories and we have to do something with them.
“I think at first we were like, ‘Let’s make a Bonnie and Clyde. Let’s make a Thelma and Louise’, something just crazy. so intense and so fun, which is what I think we feel like when we’re together.
“And we talked more about shame, about womanhood, about queerness and then the play kind of took on some further meaning and some more depth.
“Then writing wise it just sort of fell out of us from there.”
The description I saw was that it is the play you wish you had seen before adolescence. Are there certain things you wish you could have seen being portrayed when you were younger?
“Yeah, massively.
“One of the taglines is ‘the gay 90s rom com that everyone wishes they’d seen’.
“That’s definitely one of our big aims and what we really want the show to feel like.
“Rosie and I are both love rom coms and so we wanted to make something that had that celebratory feeling, something that was intense and funny and massively entertaining but also something that was kind of subverting the idea of the unhappy ending that you often see with queer or gay stories.
“We love that rom coms end happily ever after and that’s a wonderful, celebratory thing about love and that’s so often not the case with queer stories.
“I think we wanted to just make the rom com that we wish we had seen as queer women, that we could identify with and that’s kind of the aim: That the show will be that.”
It is a trope with gay characters that they never get a storyline unless it’s being marginalised or affected by something like HIV, isn’t it?
“Yeah, there’s definitely a really important space for those more serious stories to be told, and that’s vital.
“I think that that’s being done and being done well.
“Where there is a space is for shows that are entertaining and fun and riotous, and there doesn’t need to be a character with HIV, or someone’s parents disowning them or something that’s just kind of endlessly reinstating that it’s going to be really hard to be gay.
“It can also be really fun and celebratory and great and joyful, and queer people deserve to have those stories that are just like, ‘Yeah, this is f**king great’.”
You play Charlie who owns the bridal shop while Rosalie plays Clelia. There’s a connection and then it becomes apparent that you know each other..
“Yeah, I’m conscious of not wanting to say too much about how the characters know each other or what that means.
“But for me and Rosalie when we first met, I think we instantly hated each other because we loved each other.
“And it’s like this crazy feeling of the intimate connections that you can create with other women at such an accelerated rate and with such intensity.
“I think that’s what it felt like for us, as if we’d known each other our whole lives or at least in a previous life.
“It’s all of the emotions and conversations and experiences that you can have in a relationship that come off the back of that initial madness of, ‘Why do I know you so well or understand you or want to tell you everything?’
“I think that was a really core feeling and that’s what the characters are trying to figure out, why they have a pull towards one another.
“They think they do know each other but they don’t know and yet at one moment they’re being so cagey and then so candid with each other and all of the conversations that seem to arise out of that, that connection and that tension between them.”
You grew up in Ireland and Rosalie in France, did you have similar experiences of growing up in Catholic countries?
“Neither Rosalie nor I had Catholic upbringings or are Catholics ourselves, but I think there’s a level of understanding between us having grown up culturally Catholic.
“We both were christened and we both made our first communion.
“My family weren’t going to church every week but there was Irish Catholic guilt, there is a shame that I feel Irish people carry massively.
“That comes from our religious history in many ways and my parents were both taught by nuns and Jesuits.
“It’s not that far away and I think that that is something that’s sort of inherited in Irish people as sort of like a generational embeddedness.
“I think it’s interesting how in this play and in general you don’t have to identify as Catholic or believe in that religion but it definitely is still there as an awareness.
“Repeatedly in the play, they come back to the fact that Clelia is Catholic and it doesn’t matter whether or not they believe in God. It’s just like, that’s a fact and we know the weight that it holds.”
Do you think even as the country turns away from religion, there is that hangover there?
“Guilt and shame, I think, are unfortunately feelings that are very present in Ireland as a nation and as a people.
“I think the tide is massively turning and people are entitled to be whatever religion and it is becoming a lot more that way.
“But for me, it feels like the fact that my parents’ lives and upbringings were so entrenched in Catholicism, not because they believed in it, but just because that was the cultural or societal norm- Even my generation turning away from it, it doesn’t mean that all of that isn’t still there in the background, like whispers in another room.
“I think that feeling is something that’s hard to just walk away from overnight and I think that there’s a level of inherited shame and guilt that I think is quite present for Irish people.”
Maybe now we’re not such a Catholic country anymore, we just have the Catholic shame now…
“I think that’s a great way of putting it, yeah and I think I’d argue that we do.”
You’re just 22, do you have a sense of growing up post- same sex marriage referendum, what impact do you feel that has had?
“Funnily enough that hasn’t come up that much but that’s actually a really good reference point for me personally, because I was in second year, third year of secondary school.
“I kind of had grown up with that backdrop of religion but not thought all that much of it necessarily.
“Like, I went to school, I had my friends, I lived a good life before you kind of have that slight political awakening that you have around 15, 16, and then I think the referendums, both actually the gay marriage referendum and the repeal the eighth referendum, particularly for their links to religion, were a huge aspect of it.
“They really struck a chord because I think there was a sense of bewilderment that this could possibly still not be okay.
“I also think maybe there was some subconscious suppressing going on because I wouldn’t say that my school was a particularly gay or open or welcoming place.
“I think I was just sort of like, ‘I know that this maybe isn’t the place for me or these aren’t necessarily my people, but hey ho life goes on and I’ll probably leave here eventually anyway’.
“But then I started to feel anger and rage.
“I was angry at 15, 16 about the fact that I was from a place and surrounded by people and in a country that felt like it had such a different view and value system to me.”
You have lived and studied in England for years now, do you feel things have changed? Are we perhaps even more progressive in Ireland than here?
“It’s changed massively since then, that was obviously a good few years ago and I haven’t lived in Ireland as an adult.
“But I know there has been massive, massive changes in people’s attitudes and what’s normalised and what’s not and also people’s general awareness of the fact that that’s a big thing.
“I talk to girls I went to school with and they’re like, ‘God, isn’t it so crazy that it would have been terrifying for someone in our year to have come out as X, Y, Z or thought of as X, Y, Z?’
“And now in our early 20s we’re like, ‘God, do you remember how we went through that? Isn’t that crazy?’
“That’s definitely a feeling now which is wonderful.
“I don’t think I could speak on either country as an entirety because you’re always in an echo chamber.
“I go to uni and I’m in theatre and drama and stuff.
“I’m surrounded by a very queer community but if you go here and you maybe study engineering, that wouldn’t be your experience.
“I think the same is probably to be said for who you know and what kind of circles you move in in Ireland.
“But in general, I think there’s more celebration than there’s ever been and that’s a wonderful thing.
“I think that the celebration of it is the most defiant thing that we can do.”
That brings us back to the play, that celebration is what you feel has been missing from stories about gay characters and their love stories in media..
“I think those love stories do exist and they’re existing more and more.
“I do feel that the Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral/ Love Actually) rom com of boy and girl meets, and there is a million obstacles and yet they end up together in the most brilliant way, that kind of simple, entertaining, celebratory type of story, I don’t think is there as much.
“I think we are starting to more but growing up we rarely saw love stories or stories about gay characters that wasn’t about the fact that they were gay, so even if it was a love story and they did end up together, every single obstacle and trial and tribulation just comes from the fact that their sexuality can never not be an issue.
“But there can be conflicts to do with more than just simply the fact that they’re gay.
“And they can end up together and not have to have fought off a disease or a sort of marginalization in the same way that it’s so often through the lens of.
“I think that it’s a love story between two women that isn’t about the fact that they are two women.
“And love conquers all.”
Are there elements of Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise, two things that you mentioned at the top of our chat? Or are there other pieces that the play tries to capture the energy of?
“I think at points it feels like it has like the energy of something like Wild Child where it’s like just two girls going crazy playing dress up.
“At points there’s more sincerity or emotional depth.
“My best way of describing the show, or what I want it to feel like, is that it should feel like a tennis match.
“I’ve always loved the analogy that I feel like the theatre that I love to watch feels like watching a great game of tennis because there’s volleying and then balls go out and there’s a reset and that kind of like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
“You’re trying to keep up with the characters and know who’s saying what and what point is going where, and when it’s magical or when it’s reality or when it’s fantastical, that sort of desperately looking back and forth to try and figure out where you are, that feeling and that excitement and engagement is what I think the show will feel like.”
You’ve been to Edinburgh before, are you looking forward to going back with this play?
“Yeah. I’m really, really excited. I’m a nervous wreck because we’re performing for the whole month.
“And also, I’m not an actor by trade. It’s scary to me but I do think this play is so perfect for the fringe.
“It’s got this whimsicalness and the madness but also love and vulnerability and honesty.
“It’s going to be a kind of fusion of those two things.
“Obviously, Edinburgh Fringe is amazing. It’s the biggest arts festival in the world. You’ve got so many different people whether that’s all just visitors or other creatives or theatre makers.
“It’s just really exciting to be in a space where we can get everyone from every different walk of life to see this show.
“I think at its core, it’s a show about love and I’m really excited to see how that resonates with different types of audience members.”
Gogo Boots Go plays at Zoo Playground, Playground 3, High School Yards, EH1 1LZ (Venue 186) until 25 August (not 12 & 19).
For more information, click here.
